Gender Program in Rural India

Gender program in Village Khushipura, Uttar Pradesh

Situated 210 kilometers from National Capital of India New Delhi, Khushipura is a small village with a population of 6000 (approx.) district Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh. During COVID-19, Sahas conducted workshops with the young women from this village through mobile phone on the issues of periods and sanitation, reproductive health and gender based violence. One of the most important reflections from various sessions was that the women in the village had no knowledge about their own body and reproductive health; and this becomes life threatening here because 90 % of girls are married before the age of 14 years, resulting in early pregnancies endangering the lives of both the mother and child. This village has no healthcare support and hospital within the radius of 10 kilometers.

International Women’s Day : Women and Girls of Village Khushipura celebrated International Women’s Day for the first time on 8^th March 2021 by participating in 3 day event organized from 6^th March -8^th March. This celebratory event included knowledge building workshops with adolescent girls, young women and capacity building workshop with Anganwadi and Asha workers from the village on reproductive health.  On the second day, we hosted screening of Movie ‘Dor’ followed by Football match for adolescent girls on the final day. 

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With vision to create gender sensitive villages in Uttar Pradesh, Sahas organized ‘Awareness program for rural women and girls’ during 16 days of Activism in December 2020.

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Gender program with Self-help groups in Baghpat, Uttar Pradesh

This comprises of facets of knowledge building on the issues of gender, sexuality and reproductive health; building their capacity to understand gender based violence and recognizing the need to challenge GBV. This program also aims to engage women into feminist leadership by understanding their personal lives, capacities and bringing the idea of “self-help groups” to become self-reliant and build into empathetic leaders in their spheres of life.

Self-help groups, Binauli Block, Baghpat (Uttar Pradesh) : Sahas, for the first time collaborated with the Baghpat District Administration for the implementation of Gender, sexuality and feminist leadership curriculum wherein we engaged with 70 women from different self-help groups functional in Binauli block in the month of July’2017.

Self-help groups in Pilana Block, Baghpat : We engaged with 80 women from self-help groups in the two villages of Pilana block as part of our collaboration with the Baghpat District Administration for our second intervention in Novemeber’2017.

The intervention covered primarily three major objectives; first, knowledge building on concepts such as gender, sexuality and reproductive health; second, building their capacity to understand gender based violence and challenge the same and third, engaging the women into feminist leadership by understanding their personal selves, capacities and bringing the idea of “self-help groups” to become self-reliant and build into empathetic leaders in their spheres of life.

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