Periods Don't Stop for COVID19 Pandemic Help Girls

Centre for Women's Development and Research-CWDR

Periods Don't stop for  Covid -19 Pandemic, Help Girls

Project No: #46567

Update August 2021

 We can say 'It was the worst of times, it was the best times'. Covid 19 lockdown continues, during the Covid 19 second wave the situation become worse in our working areas. Schools remain closed for more than 18 months, most of the children’s parents have also lost their jobs.  We have been mobilising relief materials and distribute among them. But the worst thing happened 4 of our staff members tested Corona positive and ordered to quarantine for 2 weeks from July 15th onwards, and all activities were stopped.  In the meantime 12standary examination results were announced and the government said all children are passed on their past performances. Funding crunch become acute.  It is nearly 3 years we have not received any donations from the GlobalGiving.

It was the best of times.  Our campaign 'Periods don't stop for Pandemics help adolescent girls' campaign requesting public to order sanitary pads online and request the online shop to  deliver it in our office, went very well.  We have used all the social media and also newspapers to reach the public. So far we could able to get more than 5 sanitary pads and it was distributed among 2000 adolescent girls. We realized may be this campaign worked because we were requesting for sanitary pads and not money.  This campaign also helped us to use the online social media for future campaigns.  Even though most of the time we work from home, but reaching people like for distribution of relief materials and sanitary pads cannot be done work from home, our filed staff have to visit the field and motivate the local CBOs-Community Based Organizations, for us it is our own "Manushi' domestic workers association, 'Maithri' single women's association and 'Snehidhi' adolescent girls association to choose the beneficiaries, because of limited resources we could distribute the relief materials and sanitary pads all the women and girls.  This activities also helped the CBOs to become active.  For sanitary pads the 'Snehidhi' adolescent girls have selected 2000 girls for the sanitary pads and they have organized the distribution of it mostly house to house distribution, or in small groups.  Identifying beneficiaries helped us to think about creating a database of our target women and adolescent girls No we are in the process of helping the 12th standard passed girls who wish to go for higher education that is undergraduate level.  But most of the parents and girls don't want to continue their education because it is online and they don't have the necessary equipment, college education is also expensive. Parents started thinking about their daughters marriage.  In fact during this Covid 19 lockdown the number of child marriages and abuse of girl children have increased. Another thing happened is after seeing our sanitary pad campaign a multinational company gave chocolates to distribute among children. The chocolates were expensive and big so we have divided it among 2 children and in Total distributed to 1000 children.  Children were so happy to receive chocolates and eat it, may be this is the first time they eat such expensive chocolates. This also helped us to reflect on why we are not distributing fun foods like chocolates and ice creams to children, our idea of supplementary food for children is based on nutrition, we realized this is very important but being children they also need fun foods like chocolates and ice creams, may be in future once is while also try to provide this.

We are in the process of changing our work pattern based on the Covid 19 realities like using more digital tools, help adolescent girls in their online education. Like the poor adolescent girls missing online classes because they don't have smartphones or broadband connections, we also don't have the necessary resources to digitalize our activities and reach girls and women during this critical time.  We are making attempts and hope we will overcome all the difficulties with the help of women and girls.