Lack of children’s education and poor health are two of the biggest problems that Jan Sahayak Sewa Samiti works to reduce in the target area. Girl education is of particular concern, with much lower importance still being placed on daughters’ schooling than sons’. Many villages in our sphere of influence do not have a school. The nearest school is often more than 3km away. Lack of immunization programmes and poor awareness of health issues is also a significant problem.
The condition of children, particularly in the age group of 4-15, throughout the region is characterized by a systemic pattern of gross gender inequity. The situation is worse for rural girls. The number of girls living in poverty has increased disproportionately to the number of boys living in such poverty, due to girl’s limited access to education, health, hygiene, nutrition, skills training and exposure and the rigidity of socially-ascribed rules. Girl children are accorded low status and as victims of unequal treatment find it increasingly difficult to overcome socially ascribed roles. This is most critically reflected in her physical, social and economic conditions.
Female children in the villages get less food, poorer health care and a reduced access education than male children
7 out of 12 children in the villages are illiterate, particularly girl child.
In the rigid social taboos that idolizes sons and dreads the birth of a daughter, to be born female is often as good as being born less than human.
The gross enrolment rate at the primary level is 60% for boys compared to 15% for girls.
Our efforts therefore aim at mainstreaming children into the direct development process and development education.
The region suffers from very weak linkages between the support agencies. There is also a complete absence of well-coordinated implementation strategies. We work on advocacy and campaigning involving policy-level functionaries and other networking stakeholders towards integrated child development. We aim to distill and disseminate concurrent training and grassroots case study documentation through a trickle up approach. We work at building and widening community-oriented child-based platforms as grassroots organizations.
COMMUNITY WAY TO LIVELIHOOD GENERATION
works in a diversified way of creating livelihoods and economic enterprises, here are the following:
Market based product specific skill training & enterpreneruship management.
Gender sensitivity approach to Entreprenruship Linked Income Generation for Self Enterprising Person.
GrassrootReahout and Networking on Trade & Economic.
Sodic Land Reclamation
Diversified Agriculture based products
Support for Community Mobilization and Livelihoods in urban slums and rural community.
Powering the capacity of Youth Owned Livelihood & Micro-Enterprises
Socio-Economic Empowerment of Deprived Community, Especially Women, Through Building Their Grass-Root Organizations, Creation of Opportunity & Enhancing The Human Resource Capacity In A Sustainable Manner
Community way to promote Fair Trade, Producer groups, Asset management and Economic Enterprises
Organic way to promote eco-friendly cum environment based economic clusers of enterprises
Micro-Finance way to promote Micro-Enterprises and Livelihood
LIVELIHOOD GENERATION
Conventional definitions of enterprise and livelihoods sectors tend to demarcate farm and off-farm opportunities. But people's enterprises are not defined only in spatial terms but also socio-cultural and environmental ones. Farm-based occupations still contribute the major aspect of production economics in rural India, more particularly in the largest and most populated states like Uttar Pradesh.
In the context of rural UP, it is critical that new ways and means of strengthening the livelihood of the poor communities are found. Our experience has demonstrated that the community groups show strong impetus to engage in conservation-linked production, internalize environmental issues and are best prepared to develop innovative, conservation-linked micro-enterprises.
Since the majority of our rural households are dependant on agriculture, and growing agricultural crops involves very costly inputs, new conservation-linked livelihoods based on land management are indispensable.Parmarthm Society has developed a comprehensive action-model called Gender Sensitivity approach to Entrepreneurship Linked Income Generation for Self-Enterprising Person.
It builds incumbent and aspiring leaders from the communities that are already involved in micro enterprise or at the stage of launching one. It identifies and builds on their entrepreneurial skills, problem solving creativity and risk taking behaviour patterns. The direct link of this sector to environment conservation, stabilization within the economics of the villages or habitation, cultural expression with respect to equity and self-worth, role of local institutions, media and government and above all the value to traditional indigenous knowledge attached to such farm driven livelihood are enormously felt to be indispensable in the states like Uttar Pradesh.
Depending upon our grassroots experiences and experiments with large numbers of Self Help Groups, we very firmly experience that generating market-led livelihoods and micro-enterprises with a Strong Service Driven Approach, capacity building and skill upgradation, promoting entrepreneurship development, continuing the progressive enhancement of income, ownership, bargaining power and quality of life etc. are some of the essentials that are needed to be integrated into a definite strategy to make SHG's women and farmer partners in the mainstream, and not beneficiaries.
Micro-credit without a very focused and plan driven long term organizational commitment and back up support on livelihoods and micro-enterprises can never help the members to become the mainstream partners. Hence, the practice of SHGs shall still keep their members within marginalized and deprived status of development unless the focused and market-led livelihoods and micro-enterprises are integrated into it for the betterment of their quality of life.