Promoting awareness among women in the slums of Bangalore (India) on usage of Sanitary napkins instead of unclean piece of cloth during the period of menstruation. To promote hygiene and sanitation and irrdication of social stigma around menstruation.

#SDGAction42610

Description

Intro

In every slum we have adopted women belonging to the teen n adult age are encouraged to join our programme, our awareness programme is a 8 month pgm with a intake of 40 women in one batch. We give them sanitary napkins for 8 months along with a sanitary kit consisting of basic sanitisers and first aid material. We orient them on the benefits of using sanitary napkins, how to use them and ill effects of using unclean piece of cloth during menstruation. We also teach them the importance of saving money for expenditure on basic sanitary napkins after 8 months.

Objective of the practice

Post 8 months the women qualify and are launched as sanitation ambassadors in their slum, they further campaign and get other women to join the programme in the next batch similarly batches are multiplied with the help of outgoing ambassadors from our Pgm untill all the target women are reached in the slum. 
To promote hygiene and sanitation among women esp during thenTo promote the usage of Sanitary napkins in a country like India where women in Villages and slums hardly use sanitary napkins and are vulnerable to infection leading to diseases. 
 
To majority of women in slums are deprived of income and are forced to depend on their father or husband to meet thier basic needs. We provide them sanitary napkins and kit for free. 
 
To irradicate the social stigma and superstition prevailing around women during their menstruation period in India. Seeing them as unclean, they r not allowed in to kitchens, temple, they r isolated etc.. To break this stigma and empower women.

Partners

The Beneficiaries are the women living in the slums.

We encourage girls studying in colleges to donate sanitary napkins and participate in the programme through which we are educating them on health, sanitation n breaking social stigma around this.

Implementation of the Project/Activity

We are successfully running this programme since 2017 March 8 on the eve of International Women's Day.

We have so far covered 30 slums out of the 80 located slums in Bangalore.

We plan to cover the remaining 50 slums by 2020.

The women from our foundation, student volunteers n ambassadors we raise (beneficiaries) play an important role in executimg our desire to see all women in the urban slums use sanitary napkins.

Results/Outputs/Impacts

We have so far seen by 8th February 2019 , nearly 20,000 women have started using sanitary napkins for the first time.

The risks of infection, diseases and contamination has big time reduced in these areas.

We faced hostility shown to us by a few people ignorant n driven by orthodox views on perceiving menstruation period makes women unclean spiritually and physically. We have been relatively successfull after years of field work to create awareness among them

Enabling factors and constraints

- Members of our foundation contributed from their monthly income for the expenditures incurred in purchase of simple sanitary napkins n sanitary kits.

- Donation of sanitary napkins by college girl students were encouraged for this cause.

Conclusions

Slums in Bangalore (India) are deprived of basic hygiene living conditions. We can easily see 5 to 8 members stay in a small Hut or aluminum sheet shelter home with no room for privacy to the women for her basic needs. In such circumstances this programme is a big challenge yet we were his far able to achieve and accomplish to this extent.

SDGS & Targets