As some of you already know, for the last 5 years we are working in 4 blocks of the Kangra and the Chamba districts. The major focus of our work has been to address issues related to women’s socio, economic and political rights... The main Objectives of the Project are to build strong women’s collectives as Community Based Organization and strengthen women’s leadership at the grassroots. Build awareness and address issues around gender, caste, class discrimination from a human rights perspective. Similarly youth groups are formed to address issues related to young peoples’ participation in democratic processes, propagate concepts of sustainable farming practices and environmental awareness, restore, enhance and legitimize traditional knowledge and wisdom in fields such as agriculture, forestry, water conservation, seed preservation and healing practices and provide training and capacity building workshops on a range of issues to members of various organizations working as NGO functionaries in states of Himachal, Punjab & Haryana and strengthen common campaigns.
In the recent past, as part of our community initiative, we have put in place a fellowship award programme for young rural girls. The fellowship is meant for girls from poor and marginalized communities. The objective of the fellowship programme is two fold: On the one hand, the programme aims to support girls to pursue their formal education and complete their college degrees in the desired discipline and on the other, train young girls as women’s right activists.
During the course of our interaction with schools and community, we stumbled upon two challenges. We realized that a number of children, especially from remote villages are first generation school going children. Most parents are illiterate and children have no support in their homes for studies. Thus we decided to provide tutorial support to academically challenged children prior to their exams. This is highly appreciated by parents as well as teachers as it helps the school to show improvement in the performance of children. Parents take pride if their children do well. We strongly believe that it is an essential service for children from marginalised communities. Thus it is proposed to conduct similar tutorial classes in additional villages and gradually increase the outreach to remote villages. We do face the difficulty of finding qualified teachers within these remote villages and therefore would like to extend this service to other villages once we identify young girls/boys who can take up classes and help students.
The second issue is regarding the scholarships for deserving children under the violence intervention programme, Jagori has been helping women facing domestic violence, holding village meetings of women’s collectives and organizing various activities including setting up Nari Adalats (women’s courts) around the issue of violence against women. In the last three years our contact with communities has deepened. In this process we also came across children who suffer from neglect and familial conflict or abuse. Community leaders also brought to our notice that some children are also survivors of sexual violence at home. Our community team has identified nearly 50 children who require educational support. They are either orphans, or from single parent homes. Almost all of them are from dalit ( oppressed lower caste) families.
We have a number of children who are from homes of single parents with no earning capacity of the mother. Some of the orphan children live with their old grandparents who are too old and infirm to provide economic support. In the last few years we have helped nearly 50 such children by distributing sweaters, shoes, school books and uniform and stationary free of cost.. In the year 2008, we have also provided scholarships to 8 children from very poor background. The team keeps regular contact with mothers/ families. These scholarships are provided by some of our well wishers. While we would continue to raise funds from such supporters, the numbers of children who require such support are large in number. In a recent survey, the Jagori team has identified nearly 48 such children.
We are looking for support to fund some of these activities especially for the fellowship and scholarship programme for girls and children from families facing economic crisis.
It is in this regard that we are making an appeal for donations and any other support to strengthen our community empowerment programme.
We are also in need of simple computer to be able to run computer literacy classes for increased number of young girls and boys. This is to build their skills, increase their access to knowledge and information as well as strenghthen their self confidence.
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