Women going home having just attended our fortnightly Women’s Meetings

The potential of community self-help groups to enable people to achieve goals through collective action that they wouldn’t be able to in smaller groups is huge. It has been well documented in the successes of the Grameen Bank as well as other ventures which have impacted upon female employment rates and maternal health indices.

In the community we work with, the possibilities of community mobilisation haven’t yet been fully harnessed or understood. The community in Bakhel is a little different from other parts of India in that, although homogeneous in terms of caste, families are quite fragmented with limited community support structures.

Despite this we feel that there is great potential for women’s groups to start motivating change, and empowering women by enabling them to act collectively.

With this in mind we’ve begun initiating some women’s groups with the community. In August 2011 we were joined by Neha, an Indicorps intern who is staying with us until July 2012 and is going to take the process forward. Since December there that been a number of women’s meetings from which a health focus has developed. The women with Neha identified the major health risk points at different points of life, and are now devising ways to combat the various illnesses. Childhood diarrhoea was selected as the most disabling, and is  currently the women’s groups’ principle focus.