Georgetown Project RISHI x Lucky Shakti Leaf Workshop
Happy October! This blog is the second in a series of monthly blogs published by Georgetown Project RISHI to keep you updated on our work and community. Last week, we welcomed 13 new RISHI members to our team and we are so excited to continue our sustainable development work in Rajasthan!
This blog will focus on our successful workshop held in Beawar early last month. Over the summer, Georgetown Project RISHI decided to continue focusing on addressing iron deficiency anemia and menstrual health. After speaking extensively with our partner NGO, GSVS, we created a “Part 2” to our initial pilot project in partnership with the Canadian social enterprise Lucky Shakti Leaf (LSL) and the Indian NGO EcoFemme. Part 2 of our LSL project will span over a year and include multiple education workshops (the first of which we will describe below!), cooking demos on how to properly use LSL, and regular monitoring and evaluation by the GSVS team. Stay tuned to see how we are incorporating our menstrual health education in our new Pilot Part 2 program in a future blog!
RISHI x GSVS x Lucky Shakti Leaf Workshop
Our initial Pilot program only included 30 women, and our new project will include 100 women! On September 13, 2023 RISHI's partner NGO in rural Beawar, Rajasthan, GSVS, successfully conducted a training with 90 of the 100 participants. GSVS (1) educated women about the causes and symptoms of iron deficiency anemia with the help of a local doctor, (2) showed women how to use the Lucky Shakti Leaf with an animated training video in Hindi, and (3) handed out the Lucky Shakti Leaves, which RISHI helped purchase! The team demonstrated how the leaf can be used in traditional daal without any impact on the taste of the food, allowing the women to easily incorporate LSL into their families' daily cooking routines. RISHI and LSL also collaborated to create a tracking calendar for the participants so that the women can actively track their usage of the LSL. We noticed that some women did not use the Lucky Shakti Leaf regularly during our original pilot program, so we are hopeful that this innovative tool will improve compliance! Overall, the workshop was a great success and all of the women were excited to try the Lucky Shakti Leaf and eager to learn more about preventing iron-deficiency anemia.
Looking Ahead
For the remainder of this year, GSVS field workers will continue to monitor progress of our LSL Pilot Pt. 2 in the participating villages, which includes regular follow-ups to ensure our participants face no challenges in using their Leaf and track compliance through our brand-new LSL Calendars. Additionally, the RISHI Initiatives Team is excited to work on developing modules and workshops surrounding the topics of health and social justice for GSVS field workers to start incorporating into their follow-up visits. We want to help further our social justice efforts by building trust within our participant communities and educating them on important issues–including gender-based violence and nutrition–which culminates into an informed and just society. GSVS aims to run another wave of Hb tests in December with all of our participants to track our short-term progress, as well as identify gaps in our scale-up so as to better strategize our project for the next half of 2024. We are delighted to welcome our three new Initiatives team members, all of whom bring a wealth of experience to this project and we can’t wait to see the project unfold!