| Location: Baliapal, Orissa |
| Number of Fellows: 1 |
| Language: Oriya |
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Baliapal is the ancestral village of Rajendra Kumar Rana (Rajendra Ji), founder of Alternative for Rural Movement (ARM). From his early childhood, he has seen the destruction caused by Baliapal’s annual floods. Rajendra Ji grew up participating in relief work; through seeing varied approaches, he began to understand the importance of sustained long-term efforts for community improvement. Rajendra Ji began his long-term commitment to community improvement with educational reform. He and a few other social reformers founded ““Education for Rural Poor” in 1984 to improve literacy in the area. In 1989, Rajendra Ji established ARM as a more holistic approach to rural development encompassing health, education, and economic development.
Education:
ARM’s comprehensive educational intervention over the last ten years has contributed to a drastic reduction in primary school dropout rate from 66% to 30% in the Baliapal area.
ARM – together with a staff of five teachers, three part-time instructors and two teacher’s assistants – runs a “Model School.” This primary school (standards 1-5), founded in 1997, educates economically-disadvantaged students. ARM has also started evening classes on dance, music, singing, drama, visual arts, and craft. From time to time, ARM organizes health camps, science exhibitions, and various competitions. ARM also periodically invites experts from the area to speak about child rights, health, environment and other issues.
With the help of the government and private institutions, ARM has created need and merit-based scholarships for primary school students. ARM administers a scholarship examination and awards 100 children every year with study materials, a school uniform, and a bag.
In addition, ARM assisted 30 government primary schools to train teachers, to form children’s clubs, to develop youth leadership skills, and to engage parents in their child’s education. ARM has created the School Child Resource Development Centre (SCRDC) that manages the teachers training program. Over the past three years, SCRDC has trained 90 government school teachers on the use of visual aids, participatory methods of teaching, classroom discipline techniques, leadership skill training, and health/hygiene of children.
Women’s Empowerment:
ARM has organized 300 women’s self-help groups (SHGs) to develop leadership skills, raise legal rights awareness, and assist economic improvement.
SHG members primarily engage in saving and loan activities for personal and business use. ARM has mobilized a total savings of Rs. 10 million and credit of Rs. 54.2 million through its rural savings and credit endeavors. In the past two decades, ARM has assisted more than 1,300 women through its women self-employment initiatives and helped start micro-enterprises in vegetable cultivation, groundnut cultivation, petty shops, basket making, bamboo crafts and rice processing.
The SHG monthly meetings are also forums for discussions on members’ issues such as domestic violence or marital problems. SHG members participate in discussions and decision-making processes about local issues at the Gram Sabha (Village Council). SHG members help one another in finding resolutions.
For two decades, ARM has been committed to improving women’s literacy. ARM’s literacy campaigns have vaulted the women’s literacy rate from 5 % to 40%.
Village Health Committees:
ARM has formed a Village Health Committee (“Committee”) in 60 villages around Baliapal, to serve as a local council on health. The Committee consists of a local SHG leader, villagers, and government trained health workers to administer medicine for common ailments and provide consultation. ARM arranges information camps to educated villagers on health, sanitation, and care for pregnant women. The Committee provides information on combating recurrent illnesses such as diarrhea, malaria, respiratory tract infections, and communicable diseases.
In conjunction, ARM has been running a Primary Health Center (PHC) in village Paschimbad with two doctors, a pharmacist, an auxiliary nurse midwife, a lab technician, a project coordinator and an attendant. Every day, over 100 patients are treated at the center. The PHC also has emergency and delivery wards for critically-ill patients and pregnant women. The PHC organizes various information seminars and awareness programs such as focus group discussions, behavior change communication seminars, reproductive child health sessions, and information sessions for other government health service.
The Committees collaborate with and often refer patients to the Paschimbad PHC.
Need for Project:
Village Health Committee members serve as health facilitators: they provide medicine for common ailments (pain, fever), contraceptives, and general health advice; they refer cases to the PHC for surgery, advanced medicine, or other special procedures; they conduct public health information awareness campaigns. ARM’s efforts have brought increased participation in the immunization and family planning programs. Though more villagers are availing PHC services, challenges still remain. For instance, villagers delay preventative care because of lack of information or to save money. ARM seeks a more effective implementation of preventative care awareness program to ensure greater participation of villagers in its health programs.
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As an August 2010 Indicorps Fellow, you will assist the Paschimbad PHC and the Committees to be more effective to raise awareness of preventative care.
Initially, you should spend time at the Paschimbad PHC to get familiar with the common ailments and services provided there. You should engage PHC staff, patients, families, and others to understand ARM’s health efforts and challenges. Spending time in the community through village stays will allow you to understand health dynamics in the lives of the villagers. You should pay particular attention to indoor air pollution from cooking, sanitation practices, water hazards, and food intake pattern.
You should attend Committee meetings, awareness campaigns, and health demonstrations. You will learn more about the Committee’s mandate and the community response. You should discuss observations and experiences in the field with the ARM staff members. If relevant, you may suggest (and help create) role plays, documentaries, animation films, and puppetry to make the message more engaging and convincing. You may develop a kit with socio-culturally relevant tools, including posters and flip charts to help visually present the messages. Ideally, with community assistance, you can create short jingles – composed to the tune of popular local folk and Bollywood songs – to make the health presentations more fun and memorable.
You may assist the Committees to create focus groups for particular health messages. For instance, you could create a peer support group at schools; they could do a fun nail-cutting session between classes or before meals. A school group could also promote health quizzes, games, and competitions to compose health songs. A focus group of pregnant mothers might create positive peer pressure for regular checkups.
You should also liaise with relevant government officials to ensure their maximum participation in improving community health offerings. As you progress on the project, you should document key insights and learnings from your experience. You should present your findings periodically to the ARM staff to ensure continuance of your efforts after your departure.
Target Community:
Your target community will be marginal and landless farmers in the Baliapal area. A daily wage payment structure automatically puts health at a lower priority for the community thereby amplifying illnesses. Access to health services is a huge challenge for the local communities due to fragmented infrastructure development.
Objectives:
• To create innovative and engaging healthcare presentations
• To promote healthy living and facilitate use of healthcare services
Challenges:
• Gaining trust from communities on health related issues
• Navigating bureaucracy and the public health structures
Team-Based Model:
Each project is designed as a three-way partnership between you, Indicorps, and a partner organization. Each grassroots partner organization – in this case ARM – will be hosting two to four Fellows. Consequently, the August 2010 Fellowship will have both an individual and a team component.
As a team of Indicorps Fellows, your focus is to improve the effectiveness of the ARM’s programs in education, health and livelihood. Team members will focus on different areas including strengthening primary education, improving preventative health care and awareness, and supporting SHGs in better utilization of resources.
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