Action for Slum Dwellers' Reproductive Health, Allahabad (ASRHA)

The underlying premise of this initiative is that reproductive health education can be significantly enhanced through the inclusion of community participation strategies and face-to-face capacity-building activities. Along these lines, the programme draws on the "livelihoods approach" to adolescent programming, which attempts to develop technical and life skills (e.g., social and interpersonal capacities and communication skills) while influencing social networks through peer education, as well as improving access to savings, loans, and markets.

As part of this participatory process, literate 14- to 19-year-old girls who had their parents' permission were identified and trained to be peer educators. The peer educators attended a 6-day reproductive health training course and a 2-day peer-education training course to help them become more effective communicators and facilitators for group discussions about vocational training opportunities and savings account formation. The goal was to train peer educators to encourage girls to participate actively in the group discussions. Each peer educator was expected to visit every household in her locality and invite all eligible young women to participate in the project. When approximately 20 girls had been given permission to participate, a group was formed that met once a week at the home of a peer educator.

Following the completion of the reproductive health curriculum, vocational counselling was offered, which emphasised the importance of paid work and savings. Using flip books that contained flash cards, counsellors provided detailed information about short-term, nonformal training courses available in the vicinity, such as tailoring (requiring basic literacy skills that some girls did not possess), mehndi (painting of hands or feet), creative painting, dhari (rug weaving), mending and embroidery, candle making, silver ornament and link making, pot decoration, crochet, jute doll making, basic cooking, personal grooming, and fabric painting. The project also made arrangements for older girls (18 years and older) to attend government-run courses to learn skills such as bee keeping, food preservation, jute craft, macramé, cooking, carpet weaving, and block printing. Project staff encouraged girls to participate in these courses by, for example, speaking with one of their parents about the course and urging them to contribute to payment of course fees. Concurrently with the vocational skills training, counselling and assistance were provided for creating savings accounts at banks or post offices.

Girls, Reproductive Health, Economic Development, Gender, Rights.

According to the Population Council, half of women aged 20-24 in India are married by age 18; further, "women's autonomy, as measured by freedom of movement, is limited, and...domestic violence, particularly that perpetrated by husbands against wives, is condoned." Organisers note that, although there are a wide variety of livelihood programmes and projects for women in India, access is generally restricted to married women. Programmatic initiatives that prepare girls in India for future livelihoods and foster their mobility and independence are rare, and evaluations of such programmes are even less common.