Food Security through small-scale Sustainable Desert Agriculture and Agro-forestry

Food security, the availability of food, and access to it, has been a concern in arid and semi-arid regions throughout the history.  The incidence and intensity of food insecurity have increased significantly in recent decades due to climate vagaries because of climate change.

In order to improve food security in such regions, desert agriculture and desert agro-forestry has been used as a successful agricultural technique.  Desert agro-forestry has been promoted for growing of crops with the environmental support of trees in desert or arid areas. Canals have been dug up to bring river waters to remote desert areas for desert-agriculture use.   

However, food security still remains an issue in some poor households in the rural desert areas of Rajasthan. A weak welfare infrastructure, widespread insecurity, frequent droughts and limited livelihood opportunities keep many residents in conditions of poverty and vulnerability.

Since 2016, we have initiated a project with a focus on food security and nutrition for women and poor households. The approach includes awareness, food and nutrition awareness, training and resource support to start micro/small scale household food gardens promoting cultivation of vegetables, herbs, food and fruit trees within the households or in the backyards as a mechanism to respond to nutritious food shortages. This project is expected to promote self-sustained initiatives by the affected families at grass-root levels through good case projects.

This project has varied components such as community research, education and awareness on food and nutrition to create a change in people’s mindsets about nutrition through continuing inter-personal and behavioural change communications.

This project is integrated with other projects such as health, women empowerment, micro-finance, grey-water sanitation, sustainable agriculture and organic farming, etc.

As per the 1996 World Food Summit, food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. And. food insecurity, on the other hand, is a situation of limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways.

Food security incorporates a measure of resilience to future disruption or unavailability of critical food supply due to various risk factors including droughts, supply disruptions, fuel shortages, economic instability, and wars.

An internship with EduCARE India

It’s quite hard to summarize a travel experience; so how complex it is to make the point about an internship in India. Finding the right words to express such a rich and multifaceted adventure is complicated; it’s hard to talk about it but there is also so much to say.The first time I asked myself what I’ve learned from my experience in India was in a cab, coming back from a fourth or fifth visit at the hospital after an ankle injury. That day, I questioned my experience there because things turned out to be not as I expected them they would be, and I had taken the decision to go back to my country before the end of my internship, for a medical purpose. 

It’s very common to hear warnings and recommendations before traveling, such as how mentally and physically prepared for a cultural shock you have to be. If you travel for a professional purpose, you are often told that you have to be very patient and flexible, as well as open-minded. So after hearing that for a while, you think you’ve got enough and that you detain all the tools needed to succeed your journey, and then it starts. With EduCARE India, you have an Induction; you begin your insertion in your new environment; you get involved with the community; you think about some goals and objectives you want to achieve… You take a step back to analyse the situation and create a project related to the needs of the local population and the outcomes you want to attain… 

And then, you realize how big are certain barriers that keep you from doing your project the way you want to do it. You are destabilized and it’s sometimes hard to apply what you’ve been told: to adapt yourself to every situation. In my case, to be a Project Manager for Women Empowerment in Gajner was a huge opportunity to learn to work on the field and to acquire the skills related to the project management and the social development. It pushed myself to find the tools and the motivation to pursue my project even if the conditions didn’t help, such as the extreme heat, the language barrier and the lack of resources. I thought a few times that it was difficult to work with those conditions, and then other inconvenience happened, and everything became more complicated. In the most difficult moments, the professional pressure pushed myself to continue my work and find some alternative ways to conduct my project, as well as the pressure I myself put on my shoulders. I didn’t want to fail that professional and personal quest. 

At the critical moment I questioned my experience, I realized the outcomes of my internship. I truly understood that you can’t control everything, and failure brings lessons. From there,you learn how to improve yourself. And fortunately, EduCARE India allows you to make some mistakes and encourages you to move forward and think about yourself. This experience has been amazing for me because it brought me a lot on both the professional and personal sides. An internship with this NGO not only gives you the chance to work on the field with a local approach and to immerge into the culture, but also to learn more about yourself. You are not going to change the whole world with your work there and you might be sometimes discouraged and overwhelmed, but you are going to make some steps and participate for a bigger change. And you should do it for yourself; it might totally change your vision, and self-development is important to lead to a better world, in my opinion.

It took me some time to realize how important are the benefits I got from this experience. I was first not able to express them with words; I just had this feeling of emptyness and plenitude, as well as weakness and strength. I was prepared for India and didn’t really have a cultural shock. But things out of my control happened, and I felt more vulnerable than ever, without passport, identification cards, money, and with a cast and crutches. It’s at that moment that I really understood the meaning of being patient and flexible. Having to deal with that many issues while having to work at the same time was hard. But at that moment I also felt thatI was stronger than ever, because I experienced that everything depends on your mindset and that you have the control of your mind. You are the only one who can decide for yourself and your experience thus depends on you. And you can work on your self-development to improve your work.

It’s normal that such a multidimensional experience generates mixed feelings and that some things get out of your control. But it is what makes an experience more enriching and thrilling, and pushes yourself to grow and evolve. So for future interns I would say; you’ll become more independent, stronger and fearless. But at the same time just “go with the flow”, learn to let things go, to take things easy, to be vulnerable, to recognize your fears and weaknesses, to accept help… It doesn’t make you weaker; it helps you to open yourself and gain another perspective. Let down your mental and physical barriers. You will achieve a lot this way, and you might achieve more than you notice, professionally and personally speaking.

Laurence Patenaude - Canada 

Women's Empowerment Project Manager in Gajner

Work for living and enjoying life

Here we are, close to the end of this internship. It is hard to describe in words what it means to leave a place that has given me so much and has made more clear who I am and where I want to go. Many people intentionally come to India to discover their inner self in the land of diversity and contrasts. They train through yoga and meditation in order to find their path in life. Me, I came to India primarily for my CV and a genuine work interest. It turns out, it did not solely made me grow professionally, but personally also and I would say most importantly. 

I must admit the first weeks in this foreign place had not been easy. Leaving behind familiar faces and places for the unknown and not knowing how long you will be away kept me awake at night. The pressure of a remunerated job, a life stability and eventually the generation of a family are social expectations that all societies put on us. And I am not getting any younger through the years flying by…The social pressure trap had caught me unexpectedly! 

NGO work, particularly at these levels and settings, are not regarded as serious positions most of the time. Many people I know would tell me ‘You have satisfied a desire, you visited an exotic country, worked/volunteered a little, but now it is time to get back on track and work seriously’. It is indeed the truth that the developmental sector has much to offer, but in term of salary lags still behind other fields. However, and personally in my case, it was not at all what people say or perceive of it.

In these past 6/7 months I have worked more than 8 hours per day on average, I have undertaken many different roles, learnt a lot (more that I could possible expect and wish for) and stressed out much (as in all jobs, regardless of the field). I still vividly remember the major power crisis of Gajner, one day before the Coordinator Retreat, when most of the computers fried due to a power surge. Or the rushes at 7 in the morning to welcome the new interns, in the rain and still wearing a pijama. I have put 100% of my effort and at times more in the job and I do not see it as less valuable of any other position.

In fact, the minimal supervision from the beginning and the flexibility of working in a diverse setting where rules are alien to you, could be considered a hurdle as much challenging as any possible corporate responsibility.

Perhaps in this typology of work we do not see immediate results. Perhaps the systems we put in place are to be altered constantly as they are to be adapted to ever-shifting conditions. Perhaps the failures and setbacks are more often than successes. However, this does not diminish the importance of the job and the dedication that each person, be a volunteer, intern or employee put into place.

Let us do what we like to do and enjoy life and work in the meantime. Nowadays we are totally losing sight of it. WE MUST WORK FOR LIVING AND NOT LIVING FOR WORK!

EduCARE India, as well as India, has gifted me with an invaluable opportunity that will always remain in my heart (and my CV). Who knows what the future holds? I will not say ‘Goodbye’, better a ‘PhirMilenge’!

Martina Fraternali - Italy 

Education, Training and Development Coordinator

India and its transportation

Indian transport has a reputation for being a bit wild and having traveled around the country before, I was ready for anything. My weekend vacations have involved eventful travels, sometimes frustrating, sometimes amusing and sometimes downright scary! So I’m going to summarize some of the craziest things that have happened to me so far while using public transport in India…..

One of the first weekend trips that I took was to Amritsar to meet a friend from university. I took an overnight bus and slept in a small compartment attached to the wall, much like a display cabinet, it even had a sliding glass door. In the middle of the night I was woken up by angry shouts. Looking out the window I could see a crowd of furious men screaming at the bus driver Things escalated quickly and before the long they were throwing bricks at the driver who quickly retreated into the bus. They then started pelting the bus with stones and bricks, one of which smashed a window! I was pretty confused as to what was going on but after a conversation with another passenger I learned that there had been an accident and that the bus had hit someone. I’m still not sure of the details, I only hope that it was a vehicle rather than a pedestrian and that no-one was badly injured. It just made me sad to think about the impunity in India and the fact that a bus could have knocked someone over and just driven away from the scene. 

On a slightly lighter note, my journey back from induction, while long and boring, was broken up by a few amusing incidents. Firstly, the sheer ridiculousness, of a bus having to swerve to the opposite side of the road to make way for two cows having sex made me laugh. Cows can really get away with anything here. Secondly, after the bus driver took a wrong turning he proceeded to drive full pelt down the motorway in the direction of oncoming traffic! And no one in the bus seemed at all fazed! 

Finally, what should have been a perfectly ride home from the neighboring town Suratgarh turned into something entirely different. This was definitely one of the more frustrating rides that we took. After an afternoon shopping for groceries and materials for our projects we decided to try and catch a bus rather than a rickshaw home as the bus is so much cheaper. A bus was beginning to leave the station and I shouted to the ticket man to ask him if it was going to Rangmahal, which he confirmed, so we ran to the departing bus and jumped on just as it was taking off. The problem is there are two Rangmahals close to Suratgarh….  It seemed like the bus was taking a strange route out of the town so I asked the passengers if we were going to Rangmahal-Jogi (our Rangmahal) or Rangmahal and everyone confirmed that we were going to the right place. However, we took off in the wrong direction! Me and Mae were getting really confused by this point and a bit nervous as we continued down the motorway, getting further and further away from our village! So I kept shouting “RANGMAHAL JOGI??” and everyone kept responding “YES!” So I told myself that maybe they were just taking a strange route. They weren’t. Finally, we got kicked off the bus at  the other Rangmahal. Even at this point people were telling us that we were at the right place, even though it clearly wasn’t!!!  A few people who finally understood what we were talking about told us that we would have to catch a ride back to Suratgarh and get the correct bus home from there. By this time we were so fed up that we didn’t bother trying to save any more money and agreed on a rickshaw. ;)

So thanks Indian transport! You’ve made the travels to my destinations become a very noteworthy part of my vacations!

Louise King - UK

Project Manager in RangMahal 

Six months with EduCARE India

Living and working in India for six months did a lot for me. I learned to appreciate the things that seems so common, like access to electricity and clean water. I met the most amazing and inspiring people, and was overwhelmed by the Indian hospitality and generosity. India also turned me into this crazy stealing-toilet-paper-from-hotels-woman, so I would not have to blow my nose again with a newspaper in a country where tissues are scarce. It often pushed me to my limits, with a hole in the ground as a toilet, or people looking over the walls when you already have limited private space. India drove me nuts sometimes, but mostly gave me memories that will last a lifetime. 

I was part of the team that started up the new centre in Rangmahal. Since the villagers had not seen any foreigners in sixty years, I often felt like I was living in a zoo. More often than not at least twenty people would watch me eat, dance, even work. But as they got more used to us, this curiosity turned into a genuine interest in us as persons. Over time, people addressed me as sister or daughter instead of foreigner. Even though the communication was like those of cavemen, I could feel I was building strong relationships with people in the community. 

Slowly we started setting up projects. I saw the girls growing more confident and developing their personalities. Also they learned to appreciate each other more, and even new friendships developed amongst them. This was a beautiful thing to experience. We were also able to spread more awareness about topics like menstruation, stereotypes and domestic violence via workshops at the school. Topics that were taboos at first, now became subjects that were openly discussed amongst the students.

Despite these amazing experiences, there are also still some things I question about the organization. The organization is very dynamic, with interns coming and going every few months. For me it is hard to understand how a organization as dynamic as this one can create a sustainable change. I think the organization would be more effective with a solid team of employees, supported by a team of interns that bring new innovative ideas. Furthermore, I believe it would benefit the organization to have more Hindi speakers. The language barrier makes it often hard to give your projects a push, and you have to work around this. However, this is not possible for everything, which leaves you being stuck at a certain level.

Working for EduCARE was a great personal experience. I feel that in this half year, I gained five years of life experience. I got the opportunity to develop deep relationships with Indian families and experience the diversity of India by travelling to different districts. I definitely fell in love with this amazing, complex country and will have to kick off from all the chai. 

Lovely India, thank you for everything!

Iris Workum - The Netherlands

                                   Women's Empowerment Project Manager and Coordinatorin RangMahal

Leaving India

Wow. I can’t believe this is the end of my internship. Part of me feels like I’ve been here forever, but at the same time it seems like I just arrived in Delhi yesterday. 

There’s so much I could say in this blog post, but I want to keep it simple and to the point. Expect the unexpected. Unless you’ve been to India, lived in a developing country for an extended period of time, or something similar, then you’re not going to be fully prepared for what you will experience here. Don’t let that scare you though because if you have the right attitude, you will benefit in many ways from this experience. 

Come with your expectations, goals, and inspiration because you’re going to need all of those things. EduCARE will do their best to make this a beneficial and enjoyable time for you, but you can’t forget that you are here to work. I came to India planning to work with alternative energy, but in the end I created a health project and it has a high chance of being successful in all of the centers. 

I loved my experience in India and I say this after I spent days in unbearable heat and a constant state of sweat. You just have to keep a positive mind and know how to re-center yourself when others bring you down. I love this beautiful country no matter its flaws. 

To summarize, I’ll never experience anything like my time in India. It’s as simple as that. Part of me wants to stay here, but the other part of me misses home and can’t wait to see my family.

Traveling around Rajasthan

Little nice neighbour in Gajner

Anna-Leigh Shuping - USA

Alternative Energy Project Manager in Gajner

Homemade soap to make our habits more sustainable

I have always been conscious of respecting the environment and especially on not wasting resources. Water is our most precious resource on earth and, while 1 in 10 people don’t even have access to fresh water on a daily basis, we still waste it A LOT. My internship in EduCare as a SWASH intern gave me an opportunity to think about how to reduce our water usage. In a sustainable development approach, the reuse of grey water is a huge part of the solution to this problem.

In an ideal world, we would be able to have a cyclic system in our houses where no water is wasted. Unfortunately, we put so many toxic compounds in our grey water that we can’t use it for much, except for flushing or cleaning. So how can we solve this? How can we improve the quality of our grey water in order to use it for a possible garden? Where does all the toxicity come from?

And the answer is simple: imported chemical detergent. We use soaps and detergents on a daily basis for our bodies, our dishes and our home without even knowing their exact composition. And, most importantly, we don’t understand how those chemicals will affect us and our environment. So, to improve the quality of the water we put into the ground after washing, we need to know what exactly we are using to wash it.

Before all the big corporations came along with their fancy soaps, what did we use to clean our stuff? As for many times in environmental conservation research, I had to turn to our old traditional ways. Let’s make homemade soap!! By wanting to solve an issue, I could also link it to other aspects of eco-friendly living and broader sustainable development! By producing soap locally, we are reducing the plastic packaging coming into the village. Also, this can become a microfinance activity with women of the village producing this soap and selling it! Finally, we can improve the village’s health by limiting the amount of toxic chemicals used on a daily basis!

For this, I was lucky that our local liaison Manoj had a recipe for homemade soap. His auntie produces homemade soap for the whole family of 60 people! This soap is used for washing laundry, dishes and the house. To make this soap even cheaper, they use the black frying oil from Manoj’s snack shop. So this soap uses waste oil as a resource, which makes it even more a sustainable eco-conscious product!

To make a batch of around 20 squares of soap, we start by dissolving 250g of caustic soda in 1L of water. We mix this and let it to rest overnight. The morning after, we add 1L of black oil (soybean), mix everything for 30 mins and we get creamy liquid soap! The caustic soda actually reacts with the oil to form what we call soap. The proportions are calculated so no caustic soda is left unmixed since it’s corrosive so not really what you want as a soap! We finally leave the soap to dry overnight and, when it gets the expected texture, we can cut it and start using it! We had some troubles with the soap being a bit oily for laundry but we are always improving the recipe! Moreover, I found out there are so many great recipes for soap out there so it can be adapted to all different wants and needs! 

Water and caustic soda

Adding the black oil

Creamy state of the soap

Home-made soap is not the only option, as there are hundreds of ways to clean without any chemicals that pollute your body or your home! Lemon is a great natural disinfectant and is actually what many industrial soaps use as main cleaning agent. Sand is great to use to scrub dishes or house surfaces in order to remove any stain. Ashes are also traditionally used to clean the dishes in Sikh temples. Indeed, ashes contain hydroxide anions which is the compound we use from the caustic soda. So, when they mix with the oil present in dirty dishes, they actually create mini droplets of soap on the plate. So, when the plate is rinsed, all the dirt has been washed with the ashes! Some studies have been made to address eventual health issues caused by these alternative methods. But the important thing when using any method is to weight the pros and cons and understand how each method impacts your health and environment. 

I started this project by trying to reduce water waste, and ended up learning so much more about sustainable alternatives. This experience made me rethink all my habits and re-analyze the products I use on a daily basis back home. We need to choose better and healthier care products not only for us but for our future children. We’re surrounded by all these products that are supposed to be the greatest cleaning agent ever but where does this come from? Advertisement plays a huge role in this and it’s important to become more responsible customers. Let’s challenge the big companies and ask for better products, that don’t spoil our health and our precious water and earth! It’s crucial to think about the impact that every single one of the products we buy has on the environment. From this experience and from seeing other habits here, I understood how new is not always better and that in some cases, our grandparents had it figured out all along.

After a whole night

Cutting the soap

Final result

Debora Cortez Miranda - Portugal

SWASH Project Manager and Center Administrative Manager in Gajner 

Learning to learn

When I came to India with Debora, I did not know a lot about the culture and what to expect from Indians and their country. As a SWASH intern, many people in my country told me that India is very dirty with trash everywhere on the streets and that people do not respect the environment. However, I did not want to come here with assumptions and I was sure of one thing: this experience would change me and open my mind.

The beginning in the village was intense. We wanted to change everything as we had thousands of ideas to improve what we were observing - people burning their trash as well as throwing packaging on the floor, open drains where trash was floating, some trash in the fields and the cows eating it. I thought that the community were unconscious and we would have a lot of work just to make them realize what they were doing. We stayed for a week in a homestay during Induction. We shared all our evenings with the family, playing with the kids, learning Hindi, eating like crazy and of course discovering them. Thanks to these links that we’ve kept, I got a good opportunity to observe the way they are living and relate it to our SWASH project. We saw how they deal with water and trash, thus introducing us to the trash-picker of the village and helping us understand the different systems in India.

As an intern, you also travel a lot! We already went to Pushkar, Jaisalmer, Jodphur and Agra and there are still so many cities to discover. Everywhere you go, you can observe the habits and the ways of dealing with the waste in the different cities; people cleaning the open drainage, bins in the corners, men and women brooming in front of their doors - because their house has to be clean even if it means throwing everything in the streets - and even poor people collecting the trash such as hard plastic, glass, cardboards to sell it and earn money. You also see good habits like using reusable plates and glasses instead of plastic items, washing them in the shop without anyone thinking it’s unhygienic. These concrete examples made us picture the whole trash system outside of our small village and also gave us some ideas to develop, even if it is more difficult to initiate change in their way of thinking. Travelling is also a good way to understand how Indian people think as it is easier to meet English speaking Indians that we can communicate with, which is not always easy in our village with our poor Hindi. 

The more I meet and talk with people and the more I realize that they hate trash on the street and having to burn it because they feel it’s harming them as well as others. They would love to have a clean village and good health. Before globalization, they were using leaves and biodegradable materials to pack and transport items whereas now plastic is everywhere and in huge quantities. It is really hard to create a system and adapt it, especially in such a big and populated country! But the government started a campaign, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, to clean the country and it will take time but you can already see the impact on big cities. This can be a tool and a way to sensitize people in the village even if they already know that plastic is bad and have implemented their own system.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi cleaning the road to launch the campaign Swachh Bharat Abhiyan

After 3 months here, I realize how the assumptions I heard were wrong and that Indian people are every bit as smart as us. It is not because trash is everywhere that they do not care but they do not have other alternatives for now. It is exactly like in our Western countries some decades ago and honestly, do you really know what your trash becomes after the garbage man takes it from your house? We are here to help them develop a sustainable system but, since it will take time, we need to find alternatives in the meanwhile. EduCARE India's interns have many ideas such as reducing the plastic coming into the village, recycling soft plastic by filling sofas or pillows and still more innovation is to come. I still have so much more to learn from all the research we do on the Internet and in the field. I realize I did not know much when I arrived here and you could say I still know nothing but I’m learning every day and Indians opened my mind so much and most importantly, they taught me how to listen to people.

Camille Cristophe - France

SWASH Project Manager and Centre Project Coordinator in Gajner

Women of Gajner

The first thing that strikes you when you come to a rural village in India is the people. People that look so different, that dress so different and whose habits are so far from yours. But then, you get to meet these people, to talk with these people in your broken Hindi and share moments with them. And you understand just how similar you actually are. And it is beautiful. 

As fervent believers of cross-cultural exchange and mutual learning, we wanted to know more about the stories of the people who constitute Gajner. Its people, its traditions, its soul. We wanted to give them a platform to share their stories and inspire each other the way they inspired us. So, we decided to create a project named Humans of Gajner. Similarlyto the famous Facebook page “Humans of New York”, we wanted to capture the soul of Gajner through pictures and stories of its people. 

We started to think about the stories we would like to showcase and really define the aim of this project. There, we realized that, from our personal point of view, the stories who needed to be told the most were the women’s. In Gajner, men are everywhere outside, they can talk, they can decide and they can share. The women, who are often kept in their houses, can be undermined and forgotten when you walk through the streets of Gajner. But, as you are welcomed inside their homes and their intimacy, you realize just how big a role they play in their household and therefore in the community. All the women and girls we met here, whatever their religion or age, have taught us something and have a unique role in making Gajner what it is. 

So there, Humans of Gajner became Women of Gajner (at least for now). We decided to start with the women of the community we know. The stories and pictures will be showcased in a safe, women-only space that we want them to make their own: our Vikas Center ECRC. As our center’s Girls Club is held there, these stories can inspire young girls and women to be proud of who they are and find their path to happiness and accomplishment in a society dominated by men. Also, as more women come into the ECRC, this will hopefully create links between them as it is a platform for them to share and discuss. 

We planned very carefully our schedule and stories/pictures to take. But, as everything as India, it did not go according to our plan. The first obstacle was how to explain these notions, very common in our Western world, in simple and down-to-earth words so that the women can understand. For this, we were lucky to have in our team Meera, our favorite Indian brilliant doctor intern. She perfectly understood where we wanted to go with this project and adapted it to words and notions that the women here will respond to. Also, she is our translator for our encounters with the women and our project greatly benefits from the relationship she easily establishes with the women.

We chose women that Educare has established relationships with. Obviously, we wanted every single woman and girl to tell us their story as there is so much to learn from them, but we needed to choose. We wanted women that are emancipated and have found a way to be powerful in the community, to be role models for younger girls. But, we also wanted to showcase women who may seem like regular “underpowered” housewives. Indeed, many girls will unavoidably get married and have to stay in their houses, and many will be restricted in their lives by their in-laws, so we wanted to give them examples for hope. To show them, at a very young age, that society will not get to decide how strong and powerful they are. That, even from home, they are central to their family life and that they are not weaker than men. That, whatever society tells them, they matter, deserve respect and can achieve great things. 

The second obstacle we faced is the paternalist family rules. Many women/girls needed the authorization from the men in their family. This was really tough because 2 key women we wanted to interview and photograph were not able to participate in this project. The most frustrating for us was to see how enthusiastic they were when we presented the project. And then, just because their husband/father did not want to have their picture in the ECRC, we could not showcase the great role they play in their family and community. And still, there is nothing you can do as you have to respect their authority. However, we expect that in the future, when the men will see that the picture will be seen by women only and how careful we will be with it, they will be less skeptical and hopefully there will be less restrictions from this. Also, a part from their authorization, we also needed to handle their presence during our interviews with the women. For one of our stories for example, the man was the one speaking the whole time, even if we were directing our questions to the woman. So again, you cannot say anything, smile and think how you can still make the woman the center of the story. 

This project has been full of ups and downs; coping with people’s personal schedules, running after women to take their picture when they are available, having men telling us that we cannot tell their wife or daughter’s stories even if the woman seemed very enthusiastic, the cultural and language barrier… But we can definitely say that every single step, obstacle, encounter has been worth it. The road to the 4 final stories we have has been bumpy and tough but it has given us so much more than we expected. These 4 stories, written solely from what they told us, give a glimpse of these women’s pride and individuality. 

In the future, we wish to continue with this project as it is a great platform for exchanging but also deeply understanding these women, their vision and their role. We don’t know the whole of Gajner, and are actually very far from it, so this project aims to discover even more these beautiful and strong women. And for us, this project represents exactly our role within the community: build platforms for the community to express their potential and take leadership on their own and village’s path.

Women of Gajner Making of

Costanza Burstin - Women's Empowerment Project Manager and CC in Gajner

Debora Cortez-Miranda - SWASH Project Coordinator, P. Manager and CC in Gajner

Meera Suresh - Rural Health Care Project Manager in Gajner