We work with adolescent girls to mobilize community demand for health services. Participants are trained on maternal and child health issues. They then visit beneficiaries’ houses and reiterate key messages. Pilots of the intervention in Rajasthan have showed encouraging results.

Our program in Rajasthan, Akshada, was instrumental in bringing Stanford Medical College and Government of Rajasthan together through an MoU. This was a first of its kind partnership for Stanford Medical where it worked with grassroots frontline workers and medical students. Stanford provided its Digital MEdIC products to frontline workers and many of its medical courses to students of Jhalawar Medical College to increase their knowledge and skills.

Poor nutrition is an underlying cause for over 50% of the deaths among children under age five. Undernourished children grow to become undernourished adults who have poor work capacity, hence affecting their earnings and keeping them in a poverty trap. We established the creches intervention to tackle the high rates of malnutrition. The intervention targets the formative years of life, providing children an environment where they gain from good health and nutrition practices, along with holistic early childhood care.

As part of the Ayana program in Rajasthan, we worked to raise saliency for nutrition in Rajasthan with our program partner Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF). Activities such as nutrition briefing packs, a symposium, a CSR summit and media capacity building were conducted between the period of February 2016 and August 2017.