Despite the initial challenges, the workers displayed remarkable courage and determination. What made them persevere, perhaps, was the desire to prove themselves up to the challenge and to make a change within their communities.

The door-to-door surveys were completed on schedule, resulting in almost 332,500 people screened for vision problems throughout the target district. Of these, over 1,800 were identified as having unilateral cataract, over 6,350 with bilateral cataract and over 1,400 persons completely blind.

Today, these women travel many kilometres every week organizing eye screening programs, conducting health promotion events, counselling patients for surgery and following up with patients who have undergone surgery. They also network with staff from other NGOs and government departments in the area to promote immunisation, life skills and mother/child health care.

I find these women workers to be effective in counselling people who require treatment at the hospital. They communicate knowledgably about a range of issues from family planning to child health, and from nutrition to sanitation. Much of this they learned during the training phase, but they also passed on useful lessons and practices from their own lives and helped their immediate family members to follow suit. All of this has contributed to their effectiveness in helping the people they work to adopt good eye health seeking behaviour.

This initial hospital-based community eye care program is now in its third year, and the success of the women workers tests the traditional notion that only men should go out and work. But more importantly, these women have made a significant difference in the lives of thousands of people in the target communities. Thanks to them, over 3,100 people with serious eye problems have received eye surgery and almost 1,520 people with refractive error have received eye glasses.

The benefits of the program are many. The community workers receive recognition from the people they serve, which drives them to perform better. These women are welcomed everywhere, such as local festivals, and people come to their houses for advice. More importantly, they are respected by their immediate family members – especially by their husbands.

The success of the community health workers has encouraged Operation Eyesight to expand the program and recruit women for our other project locations. Today we have over 100 female community health workers for rural areas, from West Bengal to Rajasthan and from Himachal Pradesh to Kerala. We appreciate the role they play in our quest to eliminate avoidable blindness.

Learn more about these community health workers. Read about the challenges of bringing eye care to remote areas around Kothamangalam in southern India.

The post Women power drives change (Part 2 of 2) appeared first on Operation Eyesight.

In India and most parts of the developing world, men are expected to play the role of bread winners, while women attend to household chores and raise children. I worked in northern India for more than 17 years where I found this mindset quite prevalent.

It was quite natural for the organizations where I worked to recruit only men for community eye health positions. These are considered to be tough, energy-sapping jobs that require long distances to be covered on foot or bicycle through mountainous or jungle terrain. Also, interacting successfully with village elders and local government officials was believed to be beyond what any woman could do. But I believed the contrary.

Yes, there are physical and political challenges, but I always believed that women could deliver the same results or even better. My observation is that women can be more focused, more vocal and better able to empathize with people suffering from visual impairment.

Many years passed by before I got an opportunity to put my theory into practice. I joined Operation Eyesight in 2009, when it was in the process of launching a hospital-based community eye health project in Tamil Nadu, one of the southern states of India. I convinced my colleagues and our hospital partner to recruit only women community health workers for the project. We needed 15 such workers who lived in the geographic area of the project. They would be responsible for conducting door-to-door survey, holding health awareness sessions and organizing screening programs, among other things.

I wondered, would it be an easy task to recruit health workers from remote tribal villages who would shoulder these responsibilities? However, recruitment activities and efforts made by the Project Coordinator who went from village to village did result in a very high number of women applying for the positions. I was surprised and also proud of the fact that we interviewed as many as 50 women for the 15 positions.

All of this was quite new. I was a bit nervous about the willingness of these new employees to leave their homes and attend training sessions over the course of 25 days. But not only did they attend the full training program, they also displayed understanding and commitment to the cause of avoidable blindness. Each one seemed to eagerly acquire knowledge and skills related to door-to-door surveys, visual acuity assessments, identification of blinding conditions and communication methods to build awareness about eye health. But what would happen when they found themselves on the job, interacting with their neighbours?

All was not hunky dory. After training, the community workers returned to their neighbourhoods and proceeded to survey the people. They faced many hardships when they knocked on the doors to interview the residents. Some female workers were turned away rudely by people fearing they could be tricksters or thieves. Some were treated as beggars and a few were chased away by barking dogs.

Return two weeks from now, March 9, the day after International Women’s Day, to learn how the low-income women of Tamil Nadu fared in their new jobs.

The post Women power drives change (Part 1 of 2) appeared first on Operation Eyesight.