Centre for Catalyzing Change (C3), formerly known as Centre for Development and Population Activities (CEDPA), India, started working in India in 1987. In the last 30 years, C3 has emerged as a key change-making organization focused on improving the condition of girls and women in the country.
At C3, we design solutions that mobilize, equip, educate and empower girls and women to meet their full potential. We strive to create an ecosystem where all girls and women can demand and get their due entitlements. Our work addresses the challenges that they face in our country at various stages in their lives.
At the core of our work and approach is the belief that gender equality is essential for development and democracy. Our programs are aimed at equipping girls and women with practical life skills, improved confidence in personal decision-making, and increased self-esteem.
Our work ensures that girls and women have access to quality reproductive and maternal health care. We are committed to equal participation of women in governance and leadership roles as a step towards building a stronger nation.
Among the first in the country to work on adolescent health and life skills
Mainstreaming gender equality in the country’s education system
Putting safe motherhood as a priority on India’s health map
C3 works with government ministries and their departments, practitioners and think-tanks to build, incubate and develop policies and solutions that have positively impacted, and continue to impact, millions of girls and women in India. C3 is part of national and state advisory groups that have helped develop a number of policies and programs that benefitted girls and women – for example, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s guidelines for skilled attendance at birth (for auxiliary nurses/midwives), the National Quality of Care guidelines, India’s Reproductive Maternal Neoborn Child and Adolescent Health (RMNCH+A) strategy, the Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram (RKSK) guidelines, Lakshya guidelines for quality of care in labour rooms, and the National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT) framework for adolescent education.
We begin by launching the Better Life Option Program to enable adolescent girls make better life choices
We lead the Innovations in Family Planning Services Project in Uttar Pradesh under an agreement between the Government of India and USAID
We establish the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood in India to rally action to prevent maternal deaths
We register as an Indian entity to expand our portfolio in the country
We begin incubating models, building evidence and implementing programs, and testing cost-effective ways of monitoring large-scale programs
Chief Minister of Jharkhand launches Udaan, C3’s at-scale adolescent education program, in the state’s senior secondary schools
We launch Pahel, the women’s leadership program which enables women at grassroots to govern with authority
We sign a MoU with the Women and Child Development Department of Jharkhand to implement Sabla in the state
We sign MoUs with Jharkhand’s Health and Women and Child Development Departments to implement RKSK and Sabla convergent models in a district reaching 80,000 adolescents annually
WHO selects Udaan as ‘first generation at-scale innovation program’. Udaan reaches over 500,000 adolescents in over 2,900 secondary schools
Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare selects Udaan and Pahel as best practices
Our total number of MoUs with the government goes up to 8
We launch our new strategy to optimize effectiveness of public policies and programs to positively impact the lives of women and girls by reaching 5 times the current outreach
To equip, mobilize, educate, and empower girls and women to achieve gender equality.
We envision a future in India where girls and women are fully empowered and enabled to realize their rights and opportunities, and achieve gender equality.
As one of the very few organizations working in India from a time when ‘women’s rights’ was still a relatively little-known and less-recognized notion, C3 has nurtured and developed a wide range of community-based interventions and partnerships around the cause of girls and women.
