2009 Annual Report
Communities Creating their Own Solutions
In 2009, Inter Pares continued to support Nijera Kori’s work with 800,000 landless people in rural Bangladesh. Nijera Kori provides organizing assistance and training to help poor women and men to collectively bargain for better wages, to demand health, education and other services from government, and to protect their rights to communal resources.
The results of Nijera Kori’s work are remarkable. People who participate in Nijera Kori’s program have improved their livelihoods and gained access to resources such as common land and bodies of water. Their children, especially girls, are far more likely to attend school. There has been a marked decline in teenage marriage. Women participants report enhanced decision-making roles in the household and in the community. And in some villages, women participants have been elected to local government positions. Nijera Kori’s work demonstrates what can be achieved by organizing the poorest and most vulnerable people so that they can improve their lives.
For impoverished people living in the squatter areas of Metro Manila in the Philippines, conditions are abysmal. There is no sanitation, and little access to water and electricity. Health services are non-existent. Children suffer the diseases of poverty; for women, pregnancy can be dangerous.
Fifteen years ago, these conditions led two young women physicians to create a community health program, called Likhaan, in several areas of Metro Manila. Likhaan trained local women to become community health promoters, and established health surveillance systems to monitor health needs. Small clinics were set up so that health promoters could deal with family planning, pregnancies, and common childhood diseases. Communities mobilized to campaign for better public funding of health services. With support from Inter Pares in 2009, several communities created ten new health insurance circles to support members in the event of health emergencies.
Likhaan has shown that when communities are provided appropriate support, they can take greater control of their own health needs.
| Reviewed April 27, 2010 |  |
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