Addressing Health Inequities through
Empowerment
Ekjut has piloted, applied, refined, and scaled up a unique community capacity building process called Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) meeting cycle for empowering women for addressing several societal issues.
Monitoring
A robust surveillance system uses the latest tools, devices, and techniques for measuring neonatal, infant, and maternal mortality data and the status of undernutrition among mothers, children, adolescents, and women.
Advocacy
Sharing of results through conferences and publications of our collaborative evidence-based work that combines the interventions and tracking of changes uses the principle of research into policy and practice for scale-up.
Our Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) approach
The Participatory Learning & Action (PLA) approach is a community capacity building process in which women’s group members invite non- group members – adolescent girls, pregnant women, mothers, men, frontline service providers for learning, planning, carrying out and evaluating activities in a participatory and sustained basis. Trained Facilitators enable this community process. This unique approach to address issues of health and nutrition is not top down and helps communities to enhance their critical thinking. The approach consists of a four phased cycle of identifying and prioritizing problems, designing strategies to combat problems, implementing strategies together and evaluating the strategies after implementation.
What does Participatory Learning & Action (PLA) do?
• PLA establishes maternal, newborn, child health and nutrition problems as issues in the community.
• Empowers women to make decisions about health of self and their children.
• Increases problem solving skills of members.
• Helps them understand cause and effect of the problems.
• Increases demand and uptake of services.
• Includes marginalized communities and encourages inclusion.
• Ensures involvement of family members in maternal and childcare.
Geographical Scale – Up
