Our socio-pastoral intervention in the 15 villages we have been serving has evolved over the past year. We continue to focus on women and children in our outreach programmes to the marginalized.

We bring you a brief report of our attempts to respond to the needs of our people.

Pastoral:

  • We attend to all the Pastoral needs of the people in an organised manner.
  • As suicides among the young are on the rise and there have been cases among school and college-going children we have initiated a preventive approach with parenting sessions for young and newly married women. We hope to undertake more such initiatives in the coming year.

Empowerment of Women and Income Generation:

In our continuing work with women our focus this year was on programmes aimed at income generation towards self reliance.

There is a significant improvement in the standard of living among the families we have been working with over the past years. Hence we are now concentrating on the far out-lying areas.

We now have 60 Self Help Groups (SHGs) with each group consisting of 10-12 women.

    • Our attempts have been towards ensuring that government schemes are made available to women. The funds available through the government schemes are supplemented by their SHGs. About 300 women have benefitted from this assistance. It has enabled them to buy essential household items like cots, cupboards, cooking utensils, etc. This has brought about a noticeable improvement in the standard of living. We wish to continue this assistance especially in the more remote hamlets where the poverty is much greater.
    • The main activities the women take up willingly are farming, tailoring, and poultry. These have been income generating and hence in our interventions we have focussed on these activities.
    • 50 women completed a 5 month course in tailoring. This will enable them to get jobs in the garment industry as there is a great demand for this. Some of them start their own small scale business as this enables them to earn while working from home.
    • We prepared saplings of various vegetable plants and made it available for the women.
    • Two one-day seminars were held on ‘new methods in agriculture and kitchen-gardening’ with a view to introduce the women to improved farming practices.
    • 10 chicks each were given to 200 women from the hamlets where the poverty is the greatest.
    • We have recently introduced pickle making with the hope that this could become an income generating project in the near future.
    • About 500 women attended the ‘International Women’s Day’ programme. The theme of the celebrations was ‘21st Century Woman’.

 

While most of our other programmes continue, in the coming year we plan to move away from the areas which have progressed and focus primarily on the areas where the need is greatest.

We thank you for joining hands with us in our efforts to reach the poorest as our Foundress Magdalene of Canossa has asked us to do.