Word: two
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...With the help of village headmen, Ekjut handpicked women who were paid and trained to facilitate the discussions or gather data on community births and neonatal deaths. Facilitators were required to be mobile and speak two or more local languages - prepared, in other words, to bicycle from village to village and sit in on sessions. Group meetings are informal, and usually open with village gossip. Goats tied with rope to trees bleat in frustration; children squirm in their mothers' sari-covered laps. The facilitator begins with a story related to a local concern, perhaps about a pregnant girl with malaria...
...screen of its phenomenal economic growth, the country continues to struggle with abysmally high rates of newborn deaths. According to national estimates, for every 1,000 live births, 39 babies die in their first month; a third of these don't survive their first day. In Jharkhand and Orissa, two of east India's most impoverished and underserved states, the numbers are worse still - 49 and 45 deaths per 1,000 live births, respectively. The neonatal mortality rate in China, by comparison, lingers under 15. "Just improving health services will not do," says Dr. Prasanta Tripathy, who founded the Indian...
...Ekjut and the Institute of Child Health teamed up to stage a regional intervention that would show moms how they could themselves reduce this risk. Their plan was to mobilize a few thousand women from a clutch of villages in one Orissa and two Jharkhand districts as part of a three-year trial (2005 to 2008). A similar project in the mountainous Makwanpur region of Nepal, where health facilities can easily be a six-hour walk away, required the Institute to organize local women into groups. In east India, it rallied an existing structure of "self-help groups," a national...
...Nepal, where neonatal mortality in participating groups dropped by 30%, the benefits of the trial have endured. Recent estimates indicate that the neonatal mortality rate has now dipped under 30 per 1,000 live births, thanks also to the work of other NGOs and governmental organizations in the region. Two years ago, the Institute of Child Health withdrew funds and left, but the women kept on going. When Costello returned to visit recently, 75% of the groups were still active. "It's really impressive that our groups are still running," he recalls telling a cluster of women. "They...
...while women's autonomy is one of the project's goals, organizers recognize that it can't hurt to get the government on their side. The Ekjut Trial in India has expanded to five other districts in the two states; according to the NGO, 20,000 village women are meeting every month. Now the team is looking to collaborate with the Indian government's five-year-old National Rural Health Mission to take advantage of its female Accredited Social Health Activists, or ASHAs. These frontline workers, trained in neonatal care, have already been stationed throughout rural India. Incorporating them...