Mansi

MANSI: Empowering girls in remote rural locations with essential adolescent health education
Duration: 2019–ongoing
Locations: Ananthagiri, Araku Valley, Hukumpeta, and Paderumandals, of Visakapatnam district, Andhra Pradesh; and Haridwar block of Haridwar district, Uttarakhand.

The American India Foundation’s (AIF) MANSI program reaches out to adolescent girls in the remote, hilly, backward Paderumandalof Visakapatnam district of Andhra Pradesh and in the hilly, remote villages of Haridwar block of Uttarakhand. The AIF has chosen Agragami to build the capacity of frontline communicators working with the adolescent girls in both the states.

The aim is to empower these girls with essential adolescent health education that will help ameliorate under-nutrition, anaemia, menstrual hygiene, early sexual debut, early marriage and childbearing. The girls are also given essential information on newborn care to use in a few years when they do enter motherhood at an appropriate age.

Agragami provides the communicators with the material and tools needed to communicate with, and train the adolescents.

2019–2020

  • Agragami provided two rounds of training at an interval of six months, to 30 frontline communicators in Paderumandal.
  • Over an eight-month period, these communicators further trekked to 125 remote villages in ArakuValley mandal, andprovided nutrition and reproductive health education to over 600 adolescent girls.
  • They also covered 2,287 girls (aged 15 to 19) in all 13 Government Tribal Welfare Ashram Schools of Hukumpeta and Ananthagirimandals.

2021–2022

  • The plan for this period is to train 30 more communicators in Paderumandal, in Viskhapatnamdisctrict, to cover adolescent girls in another 675 villages.
  • The AIF has recently extended its MANSI program to the Haridwar and Pauri districts of Uttarakhand.
  • As of now, Agragamiis providing two rounds of training to 60 frontline communicators in Haridwar district. These trainers are expected to reach out and train over 100,000 adolescent girls in schools and the community of 400 villages in the two districts.