UN Women

Project Inspire: 5 Minutes to Change the World 2013

Tell us your life-changing idea to help women and girls in Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa!

UN Women Singapore and MasterCard are once again joining hands to launch Project Inspire: 5 Minutes to Change the World in 2013.

As with Project Inspire 2012, this year-long digital and social media driven initiative aims to inspire young people across the world to take action to empower disadvantaged women and girls in Asia/Pacific, the Middle East or Africa. A US$25,000 grant will be awarded to the winning project.

How to Enter

If you are passionate about making a positive and lasting impact towards the empowerment of women, we want to hear from YOU! Please ensure that your submission meets the following criteria:

1. The Project Project Inspire presents 18-35 year olds with a 5-minute platform to pitch their inspired idea to the world and win a US$25,000 grant. The grant must show creativity and sustainable impact on the lives of women and girls across Asia, Pacific, the Middle East or Africa through access to business and livelihood skills. To qualify for the US$25,000 grant, the project must meet the following requirements:

  • The program must empower disadvantaged women and girls with business and livelihood skills in order to attain a sustained livelihood
  • Must be an existing women's empowerment program.
  • Beneficiaries must be women or girls in Asia/Pacific, Middle East or Africa.
  • The winner(s) of this competition will have to commence the fieldwork by 1 December 2013.
  • The project is designed to be implemented with a US$25,000 budget.
  • The Entry
  • The proposed project must be an existing initiative that the participant/s is/are looking to expand.
  • The proposed project must not propagate any political view or religious doctrine.
  • Entries must be submitted in the form of either a (maximum) 5-minute video or a (maximum) 2- page A4-sized proposal.
  • Video entries are to be uploaded on any public video-sharing sites. Links to the videos must be provided on the submission form.
  • * Each proposal should address the following questions:

What is your inspirational idea?

  • How will your project change the lives of women and girls in the short and long term?
  • Tell us how many women and/or girls will benefit directly and indirectly from your project.
  • How will you/your team carry out the project?
  • Please include a timeline for the project, indicating key phases relevant to your project i.e., ground preparation, pilot phase, training period, evaluation etc.
  • Tell us the activities you have planned to help reach your goal.
  • How will you spend the US$25,000 grant to carry out the project?
  • Within your proposal, include a detailed budget plan on how the US$25,000 grant will be utilized. The budget should clearly indicate the programme expenses, operational costs, manpower costs, and other spending relevant to your project.
  • How will you measure the success of the project?
  • Submissions, either video or written, must be made in English.
  • Submissions should be accompanied by information on the existing program, biographies of the team members and any supporting materials (e.g. website, social media channels, media clippings, past awards).
  • All participants are required to submit a tweet or Facebook post to bring awareness to Project Inspire. Participants who have a Facebook account are also required to 'like' Project Inspire's official Facebook page.

Example:

  • Sample Tweet: Glad @Proj_Inspire's back for the 3rd year - another exciting project for us to participate in! Help spread the word!

To find out more about Project Inspire: 5 Minutes to Change the World , please visit www.5minutestochangetheworld.org

For enquiries pertaining to submissions, send your email to contact@5minutestochangetheworld.org

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 Jagori

Jagori invites you for an interactive discussion on

Women's Safety in Public Spaces: Tools & Experiences with Kathryn Travers

(Women in Cities International, Canada) on May 14, 2013; 2.30-5.30 pm at Amaltas, India Habitat Centre Delhi

Kathryn Travers from Montreal, Canada has been associated with Women in Cities International (WICI) for more than five years. She has worked in the field of crime prevention and has always had an interest in global work that has a local focus. In the last few years, Kathryn has been associated with various groups of women to adapt safety tools to diverse contexts, to be used by different groups of women and girls or to address a variety of urban issues. Women in Cities International works to generate and exchange knowledge on women's and girls' experiences in urban environments. WICI supports the participation of women, girls and other community actors in all processes of urban development and governance. For more information: http://www.femmesetvilles.org/index.php/en/

We request you to be seated by 2.15 pm.
For more information, please contact
Prabhleen: 9873782854 or Anupriya: 9313848225
Would request you to send a line of confirmation regarding your participation as soon as possible.

JAGORI Safe Delhi Campaign Team

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 PFI and C-NES

The Population Foundation of India (PFI) and the Centre for North East Studies (C-NES) invite you to the premiere of Where there are no roads … at the India International Centre (Kamladevi Chattopadhyaya Block) on May 14, 2013 at 6.30 pm.

The film is about a unique experiment, a major innovative health campaign that reaches some of the most marginalized and poorest communities who live on hundreds of inaccessible islands, called saporis, on the river Brahmaputra. There are no roads here. But, over a dozen specially-designed boats, conceived and developed by C-NES, and manned by doctors, nurses, lab technicians and pharmacists as well as crew, organizers and community workers reach more than six lakh people, pulling them out of a deadly cycle of maternal and infant mortality, disease and poverty, conditions which contrast dramatically with the overwhelming beauty of the place. C-NES is supported by the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), Assam and PFI to implement a project providing preventive and promotive health services in the islands through specially designed boats.

The C-NES Boat Clinic Project co-funded and supported by Population Foundation of India (PFI) is a socially inclusive intervention that has leveraged boat clinics in stepping up comprehensive healthcare services for hard-to-reach communities in saporis on the river Brahmaputra in Assam. The boat serves as the vehicle for delivering healthcare to people belonging to different states, different caste groups and divergent indigenous population and stimulating comprehensive behavioural changes among the sapori population especially the currently married women and men on issues pertaining to reproductive health and choices of contraception.

The film is of about 48-minute duration. We do hope that you will come and see one of the most innovative health care programmes not only in the country, but in the world.

Poonam Muttreja / Executive Director

Population Foundation of India
B-28 Qutab Institutional Area
Tara Crescent New Delhi-110016

Phone: 26856805 / 43894100

Sanjoy Hazarika / Managing Trustee and Founder
Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research (C-NES) Guwahati, Assam

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 Union Power

Editorial from the March issue:

The ILO's Global Employment Trends Report 2013 states that India's labour force participation rate for women fell from 37 % in 2004-05 to 29 % in 2009-10 across all age groups, across all education levels, and in both urban and rural areas.

To add to this recent National Sample Survey data tells us that of women workers in the country in 2009-10, a little over 1 out of 3 women of working age is working, at least part-time.

Agriculture continues to remain the largest employer for women with an estimated 68.5% of women involved in crop farming and rearing livestock. Roughly 10.8% of Indian working women are in manufacturing, but only in a select few industries such as tobacco (employing 2.6% of all working women) and textiles and apparel (employing 2.3%).

Construction is the third-largest employer of women employing about 5.1% of working women.

An estimated 3.8% of women work in education, mostly in primary education and about 1.1% are employed by the health sector.

Few women work in trade - about 2.1% of women work in grocery stores that sell basic food items and of course tobacco products.

An estimated 3.1% of women are employed as domestic workers. And only 1% of working women are employed in government - state and central - services.

The substantial decline of women's participation in the workforce is explained by the fall in their employment in agriculture. As the crisis in agriculture has worsened, the number of jobs offered by the sector has declined. While men have retained their jobs women have even been pushed off the farms. This brings to the fore the core of patriarchy that dominates the labour market just as in every other sphere of life. As a result a large number of women are 'self-employed' in various hazardous tasks including waste collection or are being pushed into sectors that are in the domain of being 'illegal' such as sex work, and are hence being unaccounted as 'workers'. What the data further shows us is that women are primarily employed in low value added sectors and at the lower end of the value chain in each sector. Women are employed in the beedi rolling and almost not present in cigarette manufacturing in the case of the tobacco industry, in construction they are employed in low skill manual tasks and in the garment and textile industry its perhaps impossible to find a women in a supervisory job. While it is correct to say that a large section of women are employed in basic services such as education and health under government programmes (anganwadis, ASHAs, ANMs, para-teachers etc) reality is that these are 'jobs' as 'honorary' workers maintains them at the lower end of the wage hierarchy. Legal regulation, inspection and enforcement are at their weakest in these low wage sectors resulting in high work intensity and long hours of work that are enforced by employers using a sustained violence in employment practices that range from threats of job loss to that of sexual violence. As a result, these disaggregated, dispersed and vulnerable isolated clusters of jobs for women workers pose the biggest challenge for building a gender equal work place. There is significant evidence that even when women have or obtain the necessary skill set they are unable to ascend the wage hierarchy. Breaking through the low wage-low skill trap requires us to address not just the issue of equality of opportunity but also the equality of outcomes. But discrimination, including through violence, at the workplace or in employment relations alone does not determine women's economic participation. Women's participation is in equal measure affected by discrimination and violence at home and in public spaces which define the nature of women's participation in social life including at work.

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