Future Generations Arunachal - An Overview
Future Generations Arunachal maintains a continuous community development program, as well as supporting activities.
Making use of evidence-based decision-making, Future Generations Arunachal’s overarching methodology and strategy continues to evolve to best fit the needs of its local community. Initially, the organization directly intervened in the community by forming women’s groups, a local coordinating committee, and by training women and male workers in preventative health care, conservation, and income-generation activities.
Future Generations Arunachal’s main focus is currently on micro-finance, income-generation activities, and capacity/skills training geared to enhance women’s quality of life.
Starting in 2013, the women’s groups present in Future Generations Arunachal sites began evolving into Self Help Groups, even expanding to include a new program site in Dambuk. To support this, a revolving fund was created to provide monetary support in the form of advance loans to the groups in order for them to carry out activities relevant to their work-plans. To ultimate goal of the fund is that it has the result of helping to increase the participants’ self-esteem and self-respect.
The local coordinating committee, consisting mostly of males, has worked to initiate eco-tourism ventures through establishing home-stays and independent work.
Apart from its community-empowerment program, the organization manages two Primary Health Centers in partnership with the Department of Health and Family Welfare and the Government of Arunachal Pradesh. The three-way partnership approach to this program enables the local community to be involved in the management of the center and for it to also serve as a training location for health-based initiatives.
For more information, visit: http://fgarunachal.blogspot.in/
Work we have done in India
We work to Realize Gandhi's dream to improve governance at the village level through the training of the state’s 6,000 locally-elected panchayat leaders (Gram Panachayat Members). Learn More About This Project
We work to Establish a statewide network of community-based protected areas that protect the region’s rare biodiversity while integrating eco-tourism opportunities for local communities using indigenous conservation knowledge Learn More About This Project
We work to expand oppurtunities for women through the training of women as Village Welfare Workers (volunteer community health hagents) and the formation of self hale groups. Learn More About This Project
India Residential
Future Generations has considerable experience in India as it has featured as the first field residential for each of the Master’s classes. Students have been inspired by time spent at Gandhi’s Ashram in Sevagram, learning about Gandhi’s methods of nonviolent resistance. At the Comprehensive Rural Health Project in Jamkhed, students have learned about community-based health and women’s and youth empowerment; and at the Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health (SEARCH) in Gadchiroli, students learned skills in evidence-based health work. In Mumbai, students in the two peacebuilding cohorts learned about urban housing issues from the Slum Rehabilitation Society, and were able to visit slum dwellers, both before and after relocation. The Bhimanshankar Wildlife Sanctuary in the Western Ghats area of Maharashtra state provided our conservation cohort with lessons in the protection of natural bio-diversity. Finally, a highlight for the first several classes were visits to Arunachal Pradesh, in the northeastern part of India, where Future Generations Arunachal has implemented successful Community Health Worker and women’s empowerment projects. Each of these field visits in India has emphasized the importance of the community in bringing about positive change.
Future Generations University Alumni
Santosh’s practicum focuses on human trafficking in Nepal, which was started by the Rana regime when they began bringing girls from neighboring districts and Kathmandu valley for sexual exploitation as domestic workers. Gradually, this exploitation has expanded to include internal, cross-border, and international levels of trafficking, with trends shifting from forced prostitution to organ transplantation. To collect information, Santosh used participatory tools such as questionnaires and interviews to identify the community attitudes regarding human trafficking victims of 24 respondents from the Bhaise Village Development Committee in the Makwanpur District. Santosh’s primary objective was to discover the details of trafficking in the region, and to identify the underlying causes of the practice. The study found that human trafficking occurred due to the lack of employment opportunities and resulting low incomes, which make it difficult, specifically for women and children, to live a comfortable life. It was also discovered that the traffickers are primarily relatives of those being exploited, even their immediate family members. Other contributing factors to trafficking include infertile land, lack of education, and poor irrigation, leading to limited income opportunities and a limited food supply. Thousands of women and children are trafficked to India each year, which serves as either a destination for those seeking prostitution, or a transit route for trafficking in the Gulf States and South-East Asia. In order to reduce instances of human trafficking, Santosh recommends educating foreign governments on the situation, and providing income generating activities for vulnerable community members.
Dr. TageKanno’s research practicum examines whether training selected women in the villages of Arunachal Pradesh, India will result in wide dissemination of knowledge and help bring about a positive change in the health-related attitudes and behaviors of the people in the entire village. The region of Arunachal Pradesh faces numerous challenges associated with health, including the location of villages in remote places with little or no access to roads, transportation, or information, the fear of vaccination due to the traditional, nonclinical roles religious leaders have played in healthcare, and the lack of trained staff to work in clinical facilities built by the Indian government and other development agencies. In this practicum, Dr. Kanno focuses on the effect of Future Generations Arunachal Pradesh’s approach to building the capacity of communities to improve health and diseases among tribal mothers by training Village Welfare Workers who are expected to share their knowledge to members of her group about health, and who will in turn further spread the same knowledge to men and women in the village. In an effort to provide Future Generations Arunachal Pradesh with a formal evaluation of its programs, Dr. Kanno examines whether a possible increase in knowledge and awareness has led to desirable changes in the behavior of the trial mothers in Arunachal Pradesh, and whether this change in behavior has led to the better utilization of various health care services provided by the government. Overall, Dr. Kanno determines that the villages whether Future Generations programs were carried out in the last eight years prior to the survey did far better than the control villages in terms of positive health behavior among the mothers. It was found that the FGA program has made the most progress in its promoting of home-made ORS as the first line management of diarrheal diseases and steam inhalation for pneumonia, improving nutritional support of children with diarrhea, and washing hands post-defecation to prevent illness. In addition, boiling water is more common in the intervention area, along with the less frequent use of alcohol. Overall, Future Generations Arunachal Pradesh has proved to be effective in implementing health programs across the region.
Gallery
- Mr. AtulTayeng, Executive Director (hon'y)- email. atul@future.edu cell no. +91 9436635063
- Dr. TageKanno, Project Consultant for Health system management- email.tagekanno@gmail.com cell no. +91 94360-59165
- Mr. MoneGurung, Program Coordinator- email. monegurung@future.edu cell no. +91 8414802800/8575543786
- Mrs. RubuAmpi, Finance Associate- email. rubuampee@gmail.com cell no. +91 9436631844
- Mr. Omak Apang, Chairperson, FGA Governing Board- email. omakapang@gmail.com+91 9436053870