By Keval Shah | Project Manager
Thank you to everyone who has supported this project in 2023. We relaunched this work after many years of working with the girls around the Vishrantwadi slums. Vishrantwadi lies 10 KM from Pune city centre and is close to the airport.
More recently we have focused efforts on girls coming specifically from Nomadic Tribes and De-Notified Tribes (NT-DNT). These are communities who traditionally lived nomadically but under colonial rule, found their ways of life become labelled as criminal.
The De-Notified Tribes were previously ‘Notified’, meaning that they were on official government lists, and branded ‘criminal by birth’. To this day, these communities bear the stigma of criminality, often accused of crimes they have not committed.
As a result of their traditional lifestyles disappearing, sometimes through being made illegal, many of these tribes have had to settle wherever they can. In Pune, many live in the slums around the Vishrantwadi area. The girls in these communities generally face the most disadvantage of all the girls in the slums, suffering from malnutrition and often being forced to drop out of school and marry whilst still in their early teens.
This year we are working to help 150 adolescent NT-DNT girls in the slums, 50 of whom will be given sponsorship support to complete high school. The girls will be supported in their schooling and receive training in life skills, including financial literacy, media literacy, sexual and reproductive health, mental and physical health, communication and critical thinking.
The girls will also learn about basic protection mechanisms and laws which prevent discrimination and abuse such as domestic violence legislation and POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act). These are important due to the high risk of sexual and domestic violence for NT-DNT girls in the slums.
So, thank you once again for your help with supporting this work. We look forward to sharing the stories of the girls we’re able to work with this year.
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
Support this important cause by creating a personalized fundraising page.
Start a Fundraiser
