CORO India

Its women empowerment programme focuses on empowering women from underprivileged communities to fight against violence and work together. It partners with the Azim Premji Foundation to bring together women under Mahila Mandal Federation(MMF). The Federation carries out baseline surveys to understand the health and economic conditions of women.

Women are then formed into self-help groups and trained in crafts like training and catering and build their capacities to generate an income for themselves.

Case Registration Centres(CRC) are set up to serve up to 250 households in the vicinity along with campaigns to generate awareness of the CRC’s presence. Community members can approach the CRC with their problems and the body helps them with resolution or filing police reports.

To encourage grassroots leadership CORO India runs fellowship programmes aimed at transforming individuals, community-based organisations and societies, The fellows are selected from marginalised communities and trained in skills like understanding self and community, communication and facilitation, advocacy and negotiation, research and analysis, executing social change and community development.

The fellows are provided relevant financial and mentoring support to work towards finding solutions to social issues like livelihoods, land rights, food security, violence, corruption, education and women empowerment to name a few. The fellows try to mobilise others to act for the cause of society to extend their impact and reach.

Its gender education programme evolved from the ‘Yaari Dosti Sakhi Saheli’ initiative which researched unequal sexual rules. The study focused on understanding the complexities and intricacies of relationships between young men and women from low-income communities. Young men and women trained in quantitative techniques explored the area of gender violence to understand it better and came out with suggestions for change in behaviour and attitudes towards gender issues.

Its GEM(Gender Equity Movement in Schools) attempts to bring gender equity to adolescents by including it in the school curriculum and facilitating critical discussions pertaining to unequal gender rules and associated violence.

CORO India launched the Right to Pee campaign to support free, clean and safe public urinals in Mumbai for women. This initiative was started to address the difference between sanitation facilities for men and women.

While women are charged more to use public toilets, the hygiene and maintenance are poor, to compound issues further the system is insensitive to the needs of women as far as the availability of clean and safe toilets is concerned.

The organisation has conducted detailed surveys on the conditions of the community and public toilets across many locations and has managed to get allocations of a ten crore budget for gender sanitation through its Right to Pee campaign and advocacy efforts.

The organisation empowers single women who may be widowed, abandoned, separated or never married to act as change agents and leaders in their communities. CORO India helps these women by linking them to Government welfare schemes and assisting them in accessing identity cards and bank accounts.

Property rights are given to them to provide additional security and a decent place to live. Single women are helped to form collectives of self-help groups and Mahila Mandals to enable access to education and financial assistance for small businesses.

These groups also conduct surveys in villages to gauge the conditions of living of other single women and help them in all ways possible.