Women, Girls and Child Rights Program (WoGCRP)
Women, Girls and Child Rights Program (WoGCRP) is one of the programs of Centre for Agro-Ecology and Development (CAED) undertaken with the financial support of Asian Aid Organisation (AAO) Australia in Surkhet, Dailkeh and Jajarkot districts of Karnali province. The program is focused on women's health, particularly POP/SRHR, girls' access to quality education, girls' empowerment, adolescent sexual reproductive health (ASRH) rights services, empowering children to exercise their rights in a violence-free environment at home, at school and in their community, enhancing child rights, improving nutrition for mothers, girls and children, reduced workloads for women and girls and increased income through agriculture and MAPs (medicinal and aromatic plants) based income generation. Thus the program touches the lives of children, adolescent girls and women.
The project links directly to national policies and programs related to child rights, Adolescent Sexual Reproductive Health Rights (ASRHR), and sexual reproductive health rights of women. Project outputs and activities are designed to reinforce existing policies developed by the central government, its committees and governing bodies. As such, the project coordinates and collaborates with existing governmental structures to ensure alignment with existing systems and for sustainability. The goal of WoGCRP program is to contribute to ensuring girls and women in Surkhet, Dailekh and Jajarkot districts of Karnali province are empowered to enjoy their reproductive rights and live healthy and dignified lives.
Currently, WoGCRP works with a total of ten schools across the three districts, to implement the program with Child Focused Development (CFD) approach. Implementation of the program includes working on the issus of child rights, girls' education, teenage elopement, child marriage, chhaupadi, dignified menstruation and menstrual hygiene management. It includes providing training to school management and staff on child-friendly teaching techniques, ASRHR and strategies to create gender-friendly learning environments. The program is designed to increase school attendance of children, with a particular focus on retaining adolescent girls in secondary school. The project works in close collaboration with 25 health facilities across the three districts, and provides training to local government health workers from the selected health facilities on ASRHR. It also collaborated with local NGOs namely Women Empowerment Action Forum (WEAF), Dailekh, Multi-Dimensional Development Forum (BAAM), Jajarkot and Youth for Good Governance Promoting (YGGP), Surkhet.
The first phase of WoGCRP was started in 2016 and completed in 2019. Then the second phase started in 2019 and is being completed in 2022. The third phase of the program will start in 2022 and will continue until March 2024.
The target population for this program is women and adolescent girls in three covered districts in Karnali Province. Beneficiaries (Phase I) were: Direct (12,179), Indirect (37,293). Similarly, beneficiaries (Phase II) were: Direct (8,050), Indirect (22,613).
Child Focused Community Development (CFCD) Approach
Child Focused Community Development (CFCD) Approach is based on organisational vision to foster supportive, protective, child-safe, child-friendly communities, where supported children and young people are engaged, respected, empowered and equipped with the necessary skills to make decisions that shape their own lives. Its goal is to improve holistic outcomes for children and young people through rights based programming, designed to support them towards fulfilling their God-given potential. The goal relates to the aspirations in Survival, Protection, Development and Participation. The Aspiration statements describe the higher-level impact that the program aims to contribute to through projects we support.
Girls Empowerment
WoGCRP aims to empower girls by building girls' agency thus enabling them to make decisions in life. It views adolescence in the context of physical, social and emotional, cognitive, and moral domains of growth and change and considers (a) conflict with parents, (b) mood disruptions, and (c) risk behavior as the three domains of potential upheaval during adolescence. Girls who remain in school longer are less likely to marry early and become pregnant. Education prepares girls for jobs and livelihoods, raises their self-esteem and their status in their households and communities, and gives them more say in decisions that affect their lives. Education also reduces the likelihood of child marriage and delays childbearing, leading eventually to healthier birth outcomes.
Women’s Reproductive Rights Program (WRRP) aims to bring the problem of uterine prolapse (UP) to the attention of policy makers, government, health agencies, donors, the civil society and the public in general to address it as a public health issue of the country. Under the Centre for Agro-ecology and Development (CAED), and NGO, it also helps acquire or enhance knowledge and skills both in preventive and curative measures to handle this at local levels. WRRP is the consolidation of CAED's involvement in UP since it encountered the severity of prolapsed uterus amongst women in the district of Achham while working in its agro-ecological programs way back in 1997. It takes UP as a consequence of uneven gender relations rooted in prevalent patriarchal social structure.
WRRP works in partnership with 14 local NGOs, in 65 Village Development Committees in 7 districts in the Mid and Western regions including Karnali, and in Eastern Terai region building capacity of district based NGOs, campaigners and government health workers on advocacy, prevention and treatment of it to a limited extent. In the process of expansion brand new version of WRRP is currently based in Sarlahi and Khotang districts. It reframed its program WRRP in the west to WoGCRP (Women, Girls and Child Rights Program) focusing to girl children, working through schools, families, community, child clubs, girls and women’s groups, concerned stakeholders at all levels and engaging men throughout its program to bring transformation in the society as a whole.
Activism
The WRRP has been effective in organizing the voices of women suffering from UP. Women are organized and have formed 7 networks representing from wards to VDCs to district level. They have organized number of rallies, mass gatherings, workshops, policy dialogues and interactions lobbying and advocating for the issue of uterine prolapse with concerned stakeholders. The WRRP together with district based NGOs have been successful to convince of the gravity of the issue to VDCs, DDCs, the Parliamentarians and government officials. They have helped to allocate resources to undertake the activities regarding uterine prolapse such as the purchase of ring pessaries, training government health workers.
Capacity Building
As a part of capacity building to NGOs it collaborates with local NGOs, with training, coaching and joint actions. WRRPhas provided trainings and orientations to some 175 government health workers, 125 female reproductive health campaigners and 220 UP-sufferers from 7 districts. NGOs organize events in their working areas. The government health workers were trained both on preventive and curative aspects of UP focusing on the reproductive rights of women and gender issues. The UP campaigners were mainly trained on the preventive aspects including counseling focusing on women's reproductive rights and gender issues.
Prevention
With partnership of 14 district based NGOs, the organization has also been active in prevention and awareness raising, using methods such as street drama, group discussion, orientations and door-to-door visits to educate men, couples, health volunteers and traditional birth attendants and women of all ages about the condition. Girls empowerment program sensitizes adolescents (school going and out of school) on the issues of sexual and reproductive health rights and empower them, through life skill training, peer education, ASRH education in schools, formation and mobilization of adolescent group and community outreach through peer educators for ending child marriage and adolescent pregnancy while helping them increase their access, retention and learning outcomes in schools.
Curative
WRRP has supported more than 1,000 women for surgery treatment (hysterectomy) of uterine prolapse and 1,200 women with second degree uterine prolapse were supported to insert ring pessaries. WRRD-CAED has established a hysterectomy fund, named as Maya (love) Fund raising funds through fund raising activities and collecting contribution from individuals, groups and donor organizations. It has been decentralized now to the district level in collaboration with District Reproductive Health Coordination Committee under District Health Office. These funds are used for the women who cannot afford to have corrective surgery.
Long-term vision
The WRRP-CAED emphasizes that UP is a major public health issue in Nepal, and the organization pressurize the government of Nepal to become more engaged in promoting awareness about and treatment availability for the condition on a country-wide basis. Ultimately the WRRP-CAED would like to see UP included in the National Reproductive Health Strategy, addressing it through multi-sector partners such as providing education in schools and out of schools from adolescent age, providing quality preventive and curative services, including it in relevant curriculum of relevant health courses and professional training on a country-wide scale. With the Uterine Prolapse Alliance, the WRRP-CAED seeks to improve government accountability through an international campaign that will place pressure on government and donor agencies to address the UP issues.