Equality of opportunities
Towards gender equality in rural Jharkhand through community interventions.
India is a diverse country. Discrimination or gender biases have persisted in our country in a complex manner. Only 65.46 % of women are literate compared to males which are 82.14%. India is rife with gender inequalities with the underlying premise of patriarchy, more pronounced in the rural community. Discrimination against girls and women is rampant. Only 19.9% of women are employed and 13.5 % of girls are not sent to school.
Child marriage is yet another glaring issue due to which girls are forced to drop out from school at an early age. 27.7 % of young girls are forced to get married below the age of 18.
In Jharkhand, 17.6 % of women are married below the age of 18 years, 54.5 % of women reported psychological violence, 27.4 % reported sexual violence. Women face discrimination, humiliation, and oppression right from their conception to every stage of life. Healthcare, education and growth opportunities are often neglected because of her gender.
Over the past 20 years, NEEDS has impacted over 1,42,000 children and adolescent girls in Jharkhand through its various development interventions. NEEDS is committed to ensure that all children have opportunities to learn, grow and develop to realize their full potential in a joyful learning environment free from any form of threat or abuse.
Marriage not Child’s Play a project initiated by NEEDS in the year 2015, in partnership with SIMAVI to provide alternatives to child marriage and mitigate the impact on married girls, through enhancing access to education, economic opportunities, increasing access to SRHR services for young people and changing social norms to address child marriage. Under this project, we have worked with 6,000 adolescent girls- conducted 997 sessions with 3285 adolescent girls on Financial Literacy ensuring them access to banking services. Girls have also been provided access to income generation opportunities. CHILDLINE is another project initiated in the year 2012. This project aims to reach out to every child in need and ensure their rights and protection. This year we reached out to 12233 children & 4000 adults in Deoghar under this project.
We are also supporting young girls to learn archery, under Holistic Rural Development project in partnership with HDFC to empower girls through sports. In the year 2020 we have enrolled 213 young girls who are actively learning the skills.
Yet another project Anandshala, was started in the year 2018, in partnership with Quest Alliance has been helping to create a joyful learning space by enabling students and teachers to engage in creative ways. Anandshala enhances language learning abilities of students and ownership for schooling by building stronger relationships between students, teachers, andparents. The project primarily aims at building the agency of adolescent girls between 10–19 years, and prevents early marriage and early pregnancy. This year we have worked with 188 schools with 22046 Children and formed 98 Youth Center consisting of 1700 Adolescent Girls.
We are working towards making the world a place where girls are celebrated, treated equally with love and respect. In the year 2020, we are working with more than 35,000 young children from the rural community of Jharkhand. The child protection sector of NEEDS begins with identifying child labour and out of school children across the state and initiates innovative approaches to encourage them to pursue their studies further. We deliberately work with these children, so that they can learn, grow & develop to realize their full potential in a joyful learning environment and free from any form of threat and abuse.
