Association of Medical Doctors of ASIA, founded in 1984, Consultative Status with UN ECOSOC since 1995

How it started:

Pakistan Home Health Education Programme for Premarital Girls is a collaborative effort between AMDA and National Rural Support Programme (NRSP), a prominent Pakistani NGO known for its rural capacity-building initiatives in Pakistan. The program was prompted after AMDA conducted the first survey in the country’s remote areas in September 2013 prior to the health project.

In the following year (January 2014), AMDA, NRSP and Chigasaki Chuo Rotary Club (Japan) assessed the overall health and hygiene situations in Pakistan’s provincial regions. This second survey revealed that it was women who are largely in charge of managing family health, and hence educating them (especially premarital women) on health and hygiene. It is considered requisite in preventing polio and other ailments.

As a result, the said three parties decided to jointly launch “Pakistan Home Health Education Programme” for Premarital Girls in the remote area of the country. Again, the program was aimed at educating premarital women in attaining basic knowledge on health and hygiene, and having them act as peer educators in one’s family and community in the course of time.
 

From the project launch till now:

The programme was officially launched at the signing ceremony in June 2014 in Chigasaki, Japan, followed by eight months of preparation until February 2015 in which the project team developed training materials for educational sessions and conducted additional surveys.

During that time, it was NRSP who mainly organized the preparatory activities, including the field assessment on health awareness of local population in the target regions. NRSP, then, utilized the collected data to develop teaching materials for both the trainers and trainees, and proceeded with the trainer screening process and registration of applicants accordingly.
 

Mid-term report:

In August 2016, after one and half year of health-related workshops, NRSP conducted a mid-term survey to see how well the recommended practices have taken root in each project site. The team assessed 305 women out of all 516 graduates who completed the health education course in Tehsil Mirpur Sakro (Union Council Sukhpur) from March 2015 through July 2016.

As a result, it was evidently clear that health-hygiene knowledge and practices introduced by the project have widely spread among the course-takers, their family members and neighbors alike. It is fair to say that visible progress was seen in each category although most of the trainees were illiterate and only a limited amount of time was allocated for each training session (60 to 90 minutes.)
 
What needs to be addressed, however, is that it still remains a challenge to teach trainees a vast amount of knowledge in such a short time. And for this reason, follow-up activities are a must in areas such as personal hygiene, hygienic menstrual practices and nutrition, all of which showed less improvement compared to other areas.

Besides, the project needs to target wider geographical locations as there aren’t enough potential course-takers in one locality. Hence, a plan is underway to do the project in Tando Muhammad Khan which is located approximately 40 km southeast of Hyderabad.

For details, please see the full report.