Twenty years ago, Suman was born in the confines of a thatched hut; her home before she got married at the age of 16. Her mother didn’t consume iron tablets, or undergo regular prenatal check-ups during any of her 6 pregnancies, much like the other women in the village. Lack of facilities, but more importantly, lack of awareness prevented them from knowing better. Today, the same cannot be said about Suman, who is expecting her second child.I met Suman during my visit to a “Mother’s...
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Recently Join My Village asked girls in Malawi and India to create art work that could be used to make cards for Mother’s around the world. It was fun, it was imaginative and above all it was a true reflection of how creative our girls can be. The colorful images of mothers, villages and flowers were created by our girls as part of showing how passionate they are towards different things. In Malawi, it was a free for all and when the day came, the girls...
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For decades, India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh has been performing poorly on many socio-economic fronts. Leading amongst these are exceptionally high maternal and infant mortality rates. Often, pregnancy and child birth are accompanied by several avoidable complications and risks like disease, infection and even death. In the face of all this, and to combat such problems, CARE is implementing a project to help pregnant women in rural Uttar Pradesh gain access to information, resources and support groups. The project works on individual, household and...
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Every one of us has the potential for remarkable achievements and every one of us can accomplish the impossible in our lives if given the right inspiration and motivation to do so. This is how I may summarize the good will that Join My Village (JMV) is doing. Most of our rural girls we support both in Primary and Secondary schools in Kasungu have never been to town and if you ask them what they want to be when they grew up, many of them will...
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The Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya (KGBV) was launched by the government of India in 2004 with the objective of building residential schools for out-of-school girls in marginalized communities. CARE India collaborated with the government to improve educational processes in these schools including, but not limited to, teacher development, institutional strengthening, material and curriculum development and monitoring and evaluation. Over 2000 girls in 24 districts of Uttar Pradesh have benefited from this programme.  Two such girls, Samreen Fatma and Kiran Gautam, age 12 and 11 respectively, study...
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