Empowering girls through digitisation

Aurat Raaj is a feminist platform in Pakistan that inspires and educates girls and women through innovative digital content in an effort to deliver progressive ideas about women empowerment. Through blogs, videos, workshops, mobile screenings, chatbots and an animated character called Raaji, it addresses issues of self-defence, body confidence, consent, reporting abuse, seeking help for…

Crowdsourcing and Social Change

Preethi Herman Global Executive Director Change.org Foundation In October 2015, Masooma Ranalvi wrote a blog about her experience of undergoing Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). Her blog described the horrific experience of being circumcised as a little girl without consent or preparation. What she didn’t know then was that she had just initiated the crowdsourced movement…

Empowering women with information

Women living in remote Indian villages often live a life marred with hardships. Left alone after spouses, other family members move to cities in search of better work opportunities, they have to take care of their children all by themselves like Uttarakhand’s Guddi Devi. Despite government schemes for rural employment, the villagers who rarely know…

Raking out malnutrition

POSHAN Abhiyaan is the Government’s flagship programme to improve nutritional standards among pregnant women, lactating mothers, infants, children and adolescents. In an effort to amplify the scheme’s reach in rural India through digitisation, UNICEF and DEF have collaborated to organise community dialogues in 10 states which has four phases to it.  In the ongoing implementation phase, POSHAN Preraks…

An aspiring change-maker

18-year-old Ashwini Dandore lives with her mother, father and two siblings in a small, kachcha house in Madhya Pradesh’s Khadla village. Eldest daughter of a farmer and chilli seller, Aswhini wants to be a role model for her siblings so that they too can dream big and work towards achieving their goals. As for her,…

Creating smarter villages

In Smartpur Kanchipuram, a meeting was initiated with the Tamil Nadu Animal Husbandry Department to understand the condition of livestock in villages. On March 30, a one-day training on livestock rearing was organised in Chamarajanagar, Karnataka to help diagnose the prevalent diseases as well. In Rajasthan’s Ardooka, DEF’s on-going campaign #NoMissingVoters was also conducted in…