When women are part of political decision-making bodies, there are better chances of mainstreaming the gender perspective in policies and programs. C3 is committed to ensuring women’s equal participation in governance and leadership as a step towards building gender equal societies. We partner with communities, elected women panchayat leaders, Panchayat members, Self Help Groups (SHG) and others to strengthen women’s political participation and build strong women’s leadership. We mentor elected women panchayat representatives and train them to take the lead in handling structural problems that encourage gender inequalities and become barriers in access to quality healthcare, education, and work opportunities. We believe in engaging with men and boys as well to address issues of gender inequity. The approach is to build models and evidence for finding solutions to concerns such as violence against women, barriers to women's participation in the work-force, or non-integration of gender in reproductive health programing.
Many states in India have reserved 50% of its Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRI) seats for women. However, newly elected women representatives face challenges such as lack of information and experience. For example, they struggle to understand what constitutes a meeting, how meetings are to be conducted and what is expected of them as elected members. Gender discrimination, low literacy levels, restricted mobility, and domestic responsibilities are additional barriers.
Our work is supported by in-depth research on identifying needs and building sustainable solutions that can be implemented at scale. We supplement this with advocating for better policies through round tables, media engagement, and direct action with policy makers.
Under Hamara Swasth Hamari Awaaz campaign, voices of 150,000 women in Bihar amplified and supported.
Helped develop India’s first-ever Gender Dashboard to equip government officials with information and data to make evidence-based policies on gender-related issues.
Pahel (‘to initiate’ in English) builds leadership capacities and mentors women leaders in Panchayats in Bihar to participate effectively in local governance processes, ensuring quality and accountability of health services
Sakshamaa (‘the empowered woman’) focuses on collecting robust and credible data and information in Bihar to drive evidence-based advocacy, enable policy implementation, and provide technical support to the State Government – all with the aim of ensuring that the right decisions are made on gender issues.
Do Kadam (‘two steps towards equality), an initiative to build the evidence base on what may work to prevent and address violence against women and girls in Bihar. Models were tested using the platforms of Panchayats, Self Help Groups, Frontline Health Workers, and Rural Youth Clubs to build an understanding of prevalence and acceptance of this violence, and propose models that work best to address the issue.
Prioritization of access and availability of contraception for spacing by low parity women and young people. This initiative is supported by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Organized under Sakshamaa or the Initiative for What Works and supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Round Table identified evidence-based strategies for overcoming constraints to women’s safety and mobility in Bihar, and advocated for investments in tackling these issues.
The opinion poll was able to identify certain policy actions that young people feel would limit the prevalence of the practice in the state. A total of 17,378 responses were received as part of this poll.
Adolescent girls in India face a plethora of issues and concerns both inside and outside the confines of their homes. They are married when they are underage, and become mothers when barely out of their teens. They have limited access to education, are forced to drop out of school due to a variety of reasons, and usually suffer from a large range of health problems, from anaemia to sexually transmitted diseases. Adolescence is a critical period in the life of every woman – the skills that she learns, the attitude that she develops, and the habits she adapts at this stage stay with her for the rest of her life.
C3 leverages government programs to deliver programs at scale, develop unique curricula to include critical life skills, family life and health education. The programs are delivered through a cadre of facilitators / mobilisers (many of whom are government functionaries) trained by the C3 team. Our goal is to enable adolescent girls and boys to stay in school, avoid child and early marriage, promote gender equity and thus, reduce their vulnerability to exploitation and violence.
C3 has chosen to focus its program intervention in the regions, districts and states which are the most disadvantaged in the country in terms of health and education indicators. Adolescent girls in these remote regions have very limited access to resources, facilities and education. We believe this is where we are needed the most, this is where we would be able to make the maximum difference.
Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Gujarat
Udaan selected by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India, as an example of best practices in promoting adolescent education.
All initiatives targeting adolescent girls (and boys) operational in partnership with the Government of India’s Departments of Women and Child Development, Health and Education.
Government of Jharkhand mainstreams C3’s content on adolescent life skills in the textbooks for classes 6, 7 and 8. Inclusion of our content in textbooks now enable us to reach over 1.3 million adolescents in 15,000 schools in a year.
Over a 10-month period, more than 100,000 10-24-year-olds from across India were asked to identify what they consider the most important issues related to their health and well-being. The poll, conducted both in the field and online, was designed to give policymakers an understanding of what youth in India want.
Equipping young people in Bihar with accurate, age appropriate and culturally relevant information to promote healthy attitudes and developing skills to enable them to respond to real life situations in a positive and responsible way.
Enabling 15000 young tribal girls to make better life choices by bridging the digital divide through basic Information and Communication Technology literacy, life skills and connecting them to educational and economic opportunities in Gumla district, Jharkhand
Enhancing adolescent sexual and reproductive health outcomes in the state of Chhattisgarh by improving access to sexual and reproductive health and rights information (among younger adolescents), services and supplies (among older adolescents) and increase access to youth-friendly Sexual and Reproductive Health services.
To develop a cadre of empowered adolescent girls, who are financially and digitally literate, confident in expressing their opinions and choices and ready to join the workforce.
Project Manjari enables adolescent girls to complete secondary education, delay age of marriage, delay age of first pregnancy and increase agency
To provide accurate age-appropriate information to young people in school on adolescence and growing up. To reinforce existing positive behavior and instill life skills essential to manage risk, communicate effectively, and deal with gender stereotypes and to cope with and resolve risky situations encountered in daily life
A national campaign to understand the needs and to support quality health awareness and services for adolescents and young people. To use the findings to guide health systems to become more adolescent and youth friendly. Youth Bol will bring the voices of 100,000 adolescents and young people from India (aged 10 to 24) - from capital cities to rural villages.
C3 entered into a formal collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), Geneva and Government of Jharkhand to provide mentoring support to RKSK in Gumla. Specifically, to strengthen district level planning, implementation, and monitoring. The collaboration also focuses on employing and establishing working convergence between different line departments for larger program outcomes.
Every 15 minutes a woman dies in India due to complications during pregnancy and childbirth. Every woman has the right to a safe and dignified childbirth experience. These deaths are preventable if there is access to quality medical care and personnel. If women have the requisite knowledge and services, the chances of safe pregnancies will manifold.
C3 focuses on advocacy for improving the lives and health of pregnant women, mothers, children and adolescents. We work with communities, maternal health advocates and governments at the state and national levels across India to raise awareness on maternal health entitlements; build capacities and strengthen maternal health services and systems by working with health providers. C3’s work and experience clearly shows that community-based interventions in reproductive health and rights can significantly impact women’s lives.
C3 is the Secretariat and Founding Member of the White Ribbon Alliance, the foremost alliance in the world working on maternal health. As the India Secretariat, C3 coordinates with over 3,000 NGOs and individuals, spearheading the advocacy initiatives in states and at the Centre.
Capacity building of over 21,000 health service providers to ensure quality, respectful and gender-equitable family planning services are available and accessible within the public health system in Odisha and Chhattisgarh.
Jharkhand, Bihar, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and across India
Enabled sustainable service delivery by expanding contraceptive choices and providing effective, gender-sensitive outreach
Extensive experience of implementing community-level Birth Preparedness and Complication Readiness (BP/CR) interventions
Strengthened women’s voices through innovations such as Interactive Voice Response Systems, with the aim of transforming women from passive recipients of healthcare to active advocates who would demand quality services
‘What Women Want’, a WRAI campaign led by C3 to help women demand quality reproductive and maternal healthcare, reached over 300,000 women across India and 1.2 million worldwide.
Project supported by USAID enables community participation in delivery of family planning services and capacity building of service providers on respectful care, to ensure that quality, respectful and gender-equitable family planning services are available and accessible within the public health system.
The project, supported by the MacArthur Foundation, aims to break the veil of silence around disrespectful and abusive maternity care and empower health care providers, women and communities to recognize respectful maternity care as a basic human right.
Organized to look at ways for improving budget allocation and utilization for maternal healthcare
