What We Do
Our Community
We work with the 10 most inaccessible and underdeveloped villages situated inside the Panna Tiger Reserve. The total population of these villages would be around 6000. The community living in these villages are mostly Gond tribes. Their livelihood depends on small skill farming, seasonal NTFP collection and migration to do labour work in the cities.
What Are We Doing?
Create Awareness
- Regular village health and nutrition days are organised in the villages which includes antenatal check-ups of pregnant women, vaccination and malnutrition mapping of all children between 1-5 years, one to one counselling with pregnant and lactating mothers.
- Monthly meetings with women on various contextual topics such as breastfeeding, immunization, kangaroo mother therapy, balanced diet, complementary feeding and menstrual health and hygiene, etc.
Enable Empowerment
- Nine strong women leaders as Swasthya Sanchalika in each village carrying on the on-ground health-related activities.
- Handholding and support to ASHA, ANM, Anganwadi around skill and capacity development, logistics, information and data-keeping.
- Training farmers and families in growing nutrition garden at their backyards, organic farming and growing cash crops.
Enable Access
- Regular Health camps with government and private specialist doctors in the villages.
- Availability of primary care medicines at each village.
- Providing private and government ambulance support during health emergencies.
- Referrals of patients from the community to required medical institutions.
- Primary treatment using satellite clinic with the help of a consultant doctor and village facilitator through mobile phone.
- Patient navigation and support to the community in the Panna district hospitals and CHCs.
- Collaborating with local government to avoid delays in health issues.
- Providing better seeds, organic fertilizers, agriculture experts and disseminating knowledge to advance farming techniques.
Research and Innovation
- Publishing stories, articles and papers to highlight the issues and challenges of the region in the mainstream.
- Designing contextual and innovative training methods for women leaders and AAAs.
- Maintaining real-time data from the field for every mother and child’s health.
- Conducting frequent verbal autopsies, quantitative and qualitative analysis for bringing contextual solutions.
Major Accomplishments
- Significant reduction in Infant death rates.
- Early detection of cases and patient referrals from the community. More than 200 patients have received help.
- Behavioural changes around vaccination, colostrum feeding, participation in village health and nutrition day, iron-folic acid tablets consumption and seeking medical help.
- Functional women leaders in each select villages.
- The revival of a dysfunctional sub-centre in the selected block.
- Successful collaboration with local government from different departments.
For the year 2020, the number of deaths was almost half as compared to the average number of deaths between 2017 and 2019.