CINI NEWS   CINI
November 2009

Double your money, double your impact!

A fantastic opportunity has arisen for CINI supporters to double the impact of their support. The Reed Foundation and one of CINI’s major donors have agreed to donate up to £50,000 to help secure the future of our Emergency Ward and Nutrition Rehabilitation Centre. However, the charity will only receive the full sum if we can get the same amount donated by our supporters on the 7th, 8th or 9th December through The Big Give website!

With a current supporter base of just 400 individual supporters, it is going to be a major challenge for CINI to reach this target. We are therefore also going to reach out to new supporters through the media, and ask existing supporters to help us spread the word in order to get more people involved.

The Emergency Ward and Nutrition Rehabilitation Centre give vital support to the families worst affected by malnutrition.
These services provide the long term care and support needed to empower families to break free of the inter-generational cycle of poverty, malnutrition and ill health.

Whatever you feel able to give, give on these dates and your support will go twice as far. So please make sure that you
note the 7th, 8th and 9th of December in your diary!

Below are some examples of how The Big Give matched giving scheme could help double your impact on the fight against severe malnutrition in India.

Examples of what your donation could achieve:

orange dot £31 = £62 = salary of trained health worker for 2 weeks
£50 = £100 = medicines for 6 children
£137 = £274 = rehabilitation of 2 children and training on nutrition and preventative healthcare for their mothers
£1,018 = £2,036 = salary of qualified nurse for a year
£4,950 = £9,900 = regular meals for 600 children and their mothers while in our care for a year



relief worker in front of sacks
Relief worker Abinash Gine with protective sheeting
  

seated woman with baby

Do you want to GET INVOLVED?

Donations need to be made online. For more details, please visit our website: www.cini.org.uk

For your donation to be matched, you need to give
on the 7th, 8th or 9th December - set yourself a reminder! - and make your money go further to help families who really do need our support.

THANK YOU for MAKING A DIFFERENCE by supporting our work!

Cyclone Aila Relief

We had a fantastic response to our Cyclone Aila Relief appeal in the summer. CINI’s relief efforts were focused on Moipith Island – a low-lying coastal part of the remote Sunderbans region, which was particularly badly hit.

We had a fantastic response to our Cyclone Aila Relief appeal in the summer. CINI’s relief efforts were focused on Moipith Island – a low-lying coastal part of the remote Sunderbans region, which was particularly badly hit. The £8,000 contributed by CINI supporters covered most of the cost of providing tablets to purify contaminated water for 20,000 people, food through community kitchens to 3,000 people, protective sheeting to build shelters for 1,000 people, and cooking pots and bedding for 400 people.


PROJECT NEWS

seated young boy smiling
Sujan swaps rag picking for studying maths

Sujan, aged 9, lives near a rubbish dump on the outskirts of Kolkata. He used to work alongside his mother as a rag picker, working in unhygienic conditions sorting rubbish.

In June 2008 he began attending CINI’s education camp and at the end of the academic year, passed his admission tests and was accepted into a local school.

He is now at school and is making new friends. He is no longer exposed to the daily dangers involved in sorting rubbish, though he does still help his mother carry her bags back home at the end of the day.

He has told the didi (CINI staff member) that when he’s older he’d like to be a teacher.
Sujan enjoying a maths class at the education camp


Piloting CINI’s “Child and Woman Friendly Communities” programme

CINI’s innovative Child and Woman Friendly Communities programme is now in full swing in a number of regions in West Bengal – with plans to expand to others soon. The programme is part of CINI’s strategic shift to tackle the related problems of education, protection, health and nutrition in project areas simultaneously, in order to bring about the best possible outcomes for local people.

This integrated approach entails working alongside local communities, particularly through women’s self help groups, local service providers and local government. It stimulates community driven demand for adequate health and nutrition services, and helps build the capacity of local service providers and local government to meet this demand. In our pilot area, over the 18 months since work begun, key achievements have included:

orange dot Reducing the numbers of children not attending school by 42% from 456 to 262
orange dot Building 404 toilets in homes and in the community to promote better sanitation
orange dot Raising awareness among 500 people from different sections of the community who took part in a children’s rights and protection awareness raising rally
 
seated group with woman writing on big sheet of paper
A local self-help group member from a neighbouring site identifies needs, and services and resources already locally available
orange dot Increasing the proportion of women getting full medical support when giving birth from 33% to 44%

 

standing girls with woman
The girls celebrate Children’s Day with their House Mother		   Protecting vulnerable girls

With your support, the girls’ shelter opened in February 2009 in Siliguri. It has now been running for nearly 10 months, providing much needed shelter for girls previously sleeping or
working on the streets of Siliguri. Most are from difficult and deprived family backgrounds. Some have run away. Others have become temporarily lost or separated from their families. They are in dire need of care, protection and education, having undergone traumatic experiences, neglect, abuse, violence and exploitation. The shelter caters for both their
short and long-term needs.

It provides a safe place to stay, counselling, health care, education, life skills, and the chance to play with other children. Every effort is made to reunite the girls with their families, and register them in local schools. When this is not possible, girls are mainstreamed into local supportive organisations for their long term care, or are helped to access vocational training. Either way, the girls are gaining the vital life skills they will need to live independently once they complete their education.

Breaking the inter-generational cycle: education is key
Former sex worker, Hansi, talks to us about the importance of children living in red light areas getting an education
nansi in blue sari
Hansi stands proud – a role model for her community
       Hansi is a peer educator. Now 48, she used to work as a sex worker in Rambagan a red light area in Kolkata. She is now working to raise awareness of social issues among the girls who are still in the profession. Hansi’s mother also used to work in Rambagan as a domestic maid, rather than a sex worker. However, Hansi’s older sister ended up being drawn into in the profession.

To avoid this fate, Hansi was married off as a teenager, but her husband was an alcoholic, and she left him. Finding herself with little alternatives, she moved back to Rambagan and began doing sexual favours in return for cash to feed her children.

Hansi’s son, Somnath Mali, started attending CINI’s evening education centre when he was about 13 years old. “If I hadn’t got my son into this class he would have got involved in criminal activities,” Hansi says. He is now 30, has graduated with a Bachelors degree in commerce, and is working for Johnson & Johnson in their sales department. He has been married for two years.

Hansi has a daughter as well, who is 11. She is determined that her daughter will get an education and not be another family member who has to rely on sex work to survive. She expresses her views forcefully: “If girls don’t go to school they will get involved with boys, and we will say that they may as well go into the profession. I see young girls get married, leave, and come back to work here, like I did. Women need to get an education so that they can stand on their own two feet.”

Malnutrition - we CAN help!
Freelance journalist Ciara Leeming reports on her visit to CINI’s mother and child outpatient clinics in Kolkata

Child malnutrition is a serious problem in India, where 43%of under-fives are underweight despite booming economic growth. Yet this not a health problem, but a social one. Its roots can be traced to early marriage and large families, the low status of women and poor education. Girls are frequently in poor health. They often give birth to low-weight babies, which they may struggle to breastfeed, and may quickly fall pregnant again. Healthy, empowered women raise healthier children.

I am a writer, and had visited a separate CINI project in Kolkata’s red light district for a magazine article I was working on, when I was offered the chance to attend their mother and child health clinic and to photograph what went on. I have to admit that I was shocked by what I saw – dozens of tiny babies, with twiggy legs,

doctor using stethoscope on baby
Doctor checks heart rate of a sickly malnourished child. Malnutrition and related illness in early childhood has serious, long-term consequences because it impedes motor, sensory, cognitive, social and emotional development.

 
bony heads and baggy skin. I had not realised the extent of this malnutrition crisis.

I was humbled by the dedication and care of CINI’s doctors and nurses, who weighed and checked the children, gave them injections and advised mothers on nutrition and family planning. Pregnant women were also given health checks, and in the most severe cases, children and their mothers were admitted to stay with CINI until they were out of danger.

This is essential work and improves many lives. State hospitals won’t admit malnourished children for treatment because they are not sick, they are simply underweight. Without CINI and other groups like them, many more children would die.

women weighing a baby
Weighing is important to check children are growing well. If weight has plateaued, or even dropped, this is often the first sign of trouble. If not tackled quickly, malnourished children live with a legacy of a greater risk of disease and sadly for some death in childhood.

Who are we?

CINI helps mothers and children in India break free of the inter-generational cycle of poverty, malnutrition and ill health.

We work with local community groups, local services providers, and local government bodies to bring about lasting change.

CINI is a leader in its field - having won the Indian Government’s National Award for Child Welfare in 1986 and again in 2005 – in recognition of the quality of the work done and the numbers of children helped.

  women and children in doorway

CINI – a voice for poor mothers and children in India

Now that CINI is raising more funds directly as opposed to via intermediary fundraising charities, it is important that we get better at explaining what we do and who we help. As part of this, the India office is working to cut the development jargon and to become a voice for poor mothers and children in India – expressing the challenges they are up against and how they are working with CINI to improve the situation. To help the charity achieve this, one of our supporters, Stuart Mackay, who has his own brand consultancy- ergo - has helped redesign CINI’s logo and other materials. This was launched, along with an exhibition of Stuart’s photos of the projects in October. We will be reviewing and improving all of CINI’s materials over the coming month and are planning to exhibit Stuart’s photos in the UK in February.

Thank you!

Our warmest thanks to our family of supporters who have helped in different ways – from donations of money, time, talent, expertise, and equipment for our office, to those who have supported us by doing sponsored events, raising money from friends instead of receiving birthday presents, or hosting fundraising dinner parties. We simply couldn’t have brought about the changes outlined in this newsletter without your help!

For more information about our work, recent achievements and challenges faced,
please visit the Project Reports section of our website:
www.cini.org.uk

 

form - if visually impaired, please phone 020 7582 1400