Outsourcing industrial work helps women gain confidence to move on to other jobs

A proactive organization in Mumbai, India, is providing support to HIV-positive women who are doubly stigmatized by the social and economic stresses of HIV and widowhood, providing a bridge back into the work force and training some as peer counselors. The program, which works to break down barriers of marginalization and stigma related to HIV/AIDS, is a key part of the community response to HIV/AIDS that has evolved in Mumbai since 2000.

The Sanmitra Trust, an NGO founded in 1999 to work among floating sex-workers in Mumbai’s western suburbs, has since diversified its outreach and today, it runs seven projects for HIV prevention and for the care, support and empowerment of people living with HIV/AIDS, including Swayambhoo Udyam Kendra, a self-supporting program that uses jobs outsourced from industry to provide employment, and Aayush Academy, which provides training to empower and facilitate re-entry into the work force..

Other programs include a Nutrition Resource Centre which provides mid-day meals to more than 500 children a day; Ashwini Health Centres, which teach PLWHAs to manage and stabilize their health, and Samar Sena, an advocacy task force that fights discrimination against the infected and affected.

Prabha Desai, who heads Sanmitra, believes earning livelihood is critical to well-being. “How long can positive people go begging from one church to another? Is that the solution? We have to set systems in place so people can live well.”  She says the biggest challenge for people living with HIV today is stabilising health and re-entering the mainstream labour force. “We cannot create artificial jobs in NGOs. Factories and offices are reluctant to recruit HIV infected people,” she says.

Desai’s solution - to set up an enterprise to do industrial assembling and packaging jobs, get work outsourced from factories, and train and employ affected and infected people to do these jobs – has found much support from factories producing electrical goods and from large companies. At any given time, about 10 young AIDS widows are working at Swayambhoo, working seven to eight hours per day and earning on a piecework basis between Rs 70 and 120 per day and about Rs 2,000 in a month. Sanmitra gives them a bus and train pass, along with some basic nutrition in the form of a daily snack.

Working with other HIV positive people in a safe and nurturing environment helps women reach out to each other, and being employed and taking home a salary gives them confidence. After a few months, they move on to other jobs, some in sales and some as outreach workers in health programmes or lab technicians.

Sanmitra believes in the power of peer counseling, and so it trains affected and infected people, mostly young widows, to become HIV counsellors and para-health workers in three-month courses at its Ayush training academy. The course, run over weekends, is offered free. Of the 50 people trained over the last two years, 10 now are employed with Sanmitra and the rest with other NGOs as part of the community initiative under government-run program for HIV prevention and services to infected people.

Over the last two years, Sanmitra’s outreach staff of 25 including 10 counsellors has reached out to over 1,000 infected people, mostly women. Trained women counsellors counsel pregnant women, outreach workers do home visits. The power of peer counselling is enormous, say the positive women. Thirty of Sanmitra’s staff of more than 100 are HIV positive..

This story was prepared from information on the Sanmitra website, and from a much longer story by Sumita Thapar entitled Bringing HIV positive women back into mainstream workforce, published in India Together, and distributed by OneWorld South Asia.


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