Key Data
14% women’ representation in the state legislature
12% of women at the national parliament
24% of women form the nation’s workforce
38% have right over property
28% women have experienced domestic violence.
Gender Equity
Mentoring women to play leadership roles in every field.

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.

Over 4,000 women leaders from Panchayats (local government units) mentored by C3 are driving change in their constituencies across 14 districts of Bihar
Gender Equity

Program Objectives

  • Build women’s leadership at grassroots to enhance their role in decision-making and governance
  • Amplify women’s voices to demand better public policies and programs
  • Build granular data and evidence on gender to inform policy making
Milestones
  • 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.

In our village, usually, people refer to women as ‘his/her mother/wife’. Today, people refer to my sons as Prabha Devi’s sons, which is unusual for our social milieu. It’s a man’s world, and educated people like the Block Development Officer would not even notice me earlier. Now, I have the confidence to question them on their work! I have overcome my fears and I am not scared of talking to people. In the initial days, I felt lost without my husband representing me in meetings. Now, I prefer going alone.

Prabha Devi, Member, Village Council
Updates
Round Table on Women’s Safety, Mobility &
Economic Participation

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.

Opinion poll in Bihar to understand young
people’s perception on Dowry

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.

Key Data
19.6% population of India are between the age of 10-19 year olds
27% of girls are married before age 18
35% women have 10 or more years of schooling
53% women (15-49) are anaemic
Girls’ education & youth development
Empowering the young so they can make their own choices and decisions. Providing them with safe spaces for realizing their full potential.

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.

Over 600,000 adolescents enrolled in our youth programs in Bihar and Jharkhand.
Girls’ education & youth development

Program Objectives

  • Build leadership skills of adolescents (both in-school and out-of-school) with information and education on health, gender equality, nutrition, hygiene, civic responsibility and skill development.
  • Engage with the communities through integrated programs
  • Work at scale through in-school and out-of-school adolescent education programs in partnership with state governments.

Our Reach

Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Gujarat

Milestones
  • 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.

The Life Skills Education classes give us an opportunity to know about things not discussed at home. I am now able to talk to my parents about stuff that's going on in my life.

Amba, 14-year-old student of Class VIII in Delhi

Our projects

Updates
Launched Youth Bol,

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.

Establishing Convergence,

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.

Key Data
India's maternal mortality ratio is at 130 per 100,000 deliveries
Infant mortality rate is at 41 per 1000 live births
Unmet need for family planning is 20.8% with modern contraceptive usage at 24%
Reproductive health & rights
Ensuring safe motherhood, facilitating quality healthcare

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.

Reproductive health & rights

Program Objectives

  • Ensure that where entitlements exist, every Indian woman -- rich or poor, young or old, rural or urban, living in any state in India -- has access to the best reproductive health care.
  • Promote rights-based approach to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) in India, especially with respect to care around childbirth and family planning, by addressing gaps in health provisioning through advocacy, capacity building of service providers, program implementation and research with women and their communities.

Our Reach

Jharkhand, Bihar, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and across India

Milestones
  • 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.

The warm and friendly behaviour of service providers can minimise the pain of a client even before the onset of clinical intervention.

Prafulla Sanibigraha, ASHA, Bairanda Mangarajpur village Prafulla attended C3’s training on gender, social inclusion and respectful care in family planning services.
Updates
Round Table for 35 Members of Parliament, in
association with the Indian Association of
Parliamentarians for Population and Development

Organized to look at ways for improving budget allocation and utilization for maternal healthcare