Establishing Center of Excellence
Enabling access to Quality Education & Healthcare for adolescent girls in slums who are at
risk or are survivors of abuse.
Healing the Trauma of Abuse
Codifying and scaling up delivery of Protsahan’s healing programs to heal the trauma caused by child abuse through the use of creative art, play and technology led interventions by strengthening access to mental health services and access to justice for at-risk and survivor groups of adolescent girls.
Enabling Child Protection
Scaling up work on strengthening systems of child protection across the country by holsitically training a network of key partners including government stakeholders to ensure prevention of child abuse by edu- cating and empowering families, educators, caregivers and communities with relevant knowledge, skills and resources necessary to recognise, prevent, report, and respond to child abuse based in trauma informed care
The Anganwadi Project
An “anganwadi” means a ‘courtyard shelter’. The system of anganwadis was developed in 1975 by the Indian government to alleviate malnutrition in children. The anganwadis provide millions of meals each day to the slum children under 6 years old, and also provide lessons in health, hygiene and literacy in a simple yet nurturing preschool environment.
Typical anganwadis are run for a few hours a day in local houses but are often overcrowded, sweltering in summer and have little or no light or ventilation, making it impossible for the children to learn and play.
Currently, a total of 13.77 lakh anganwadi centres are operational in the country with a strength of 12.8 lakh workers and 11.6 lakh helpers, as per the official data.
Challenges
Aaganwadi workers are overburdened, because they are expected to provide pre-school education to 4-6 year olds as well as nutrition services to all children under six. There is often a need for constant capacity and skill building and community workshops on specifically issues of child protection.
Solution: What is Protsahan doing
Capacity Building Workshops at Anganwadi Child Care Centres for Young Mothers: AWW is one of most important frontline workers, who own major responsibility for delivering an integrated package of services to children & women and building up the capacity of community, especially of mothers for child-care and development. Protsahan supplements the impact of their work through Participatory Capacity Building workshops at grassroot to share information, knowledge and skills from a legal and psychosocial lens about evolving child protection response mechanisms of the government and other critical health schemes. Protsahan’s community women champions spread awareness of prevention of incidence of child abuse, exploitation, violence and neglect of children like commercial sexual exploitation, trafficking, child labour and harmful traditional practices such as child marriage through comic books, large community gatherings and storytelling. Protsahan also provides critical Referrals and Linkages to the community women to access the right government schemes to make the government services reach the last mile.
Protsahan’s work is helping bridge the gap between the policy intentions of ICDS and its actual implementation in India’s remotest corners for its children.
