FutureGenerations

Future Generations Master's Degree Students in JamkhedThe December, 2008 issue of National Geographic features Jamkhed, a community-based rural health program in India.  Future Generations has worked closely with and continues to learn a great deal from the Comprehensive Rural Health Program of Jamkhed. As part of their India residential, Future Generations Master's Degree students reside at Jamkhed and learn from a vast range of community experience. 

With an approach that engages community and government partnerships, Future Generations has been instrumental in raising the capacity of people to create locally-appropriate solutions that last.

Thanks to a generous challenge grant, every contribution you make to Future Generations until March 31, 2009 will be matched 100 percent up to $600,000.

The Need: Death during childbirth is an every day occurrence in Afghanistan, which has among the highest rates of maternal and child mortality in the world. Many deaths can be prevented by changes in lifestyle and basic health care in the home. To change health behaviors and provide services at the village level, the Afghanistan Ministry of Health works to extend a Basic Package of Health Services (BPHS). One strategy is to train local people as Community Health Worker (CHWs).

The leaders of the work in Arunachal are local women known as Village Welfare Workers (VWWs) who help collect data, deliver home-based services and mobilize their community to implement positive change. Women are both the advocates and agents of change. As keepers of the home-fires, women are intensely motivated to help their families, and here, as elsewhere, are generally the first to embrace promising models of social change.

An estimated 79% of Afghan women and girls cannot read and write. For the Hazara ethnic communities in the central highlands, where the education of girls was once common before the Taliban, literacy for women was an early priority. At the first community meeting organized by Future Generations in Jaghori District of Ghazni Province, the first priority was education for women.

Dorothy W. Knapp, former deputy country director for Future generations Afghanistan, writes for Thomas College Magazine about the challenges involved in improving Afghanistan's education system, and how they can be overcome using our unique methodology.  From the article Raising Education Brick by Brick in Afghanistan: