Women
As a platform to amplify the voices of Adivasi and Rural Women in India, our work focuses on women’s natural resource rights, traditional knowledge assertion and women’s entitlements to engage with governance and customary institutions on gender equality.
Forest Rights
We work with women on the ground for putting up claims for formal rights to individual and collective forest lands. Adivasi women exchange learnings on the process of making claims, participating in Forest Rights Committees and Gram Sabhas and directly engaging with authorities for recognition of RoFR rights. As new threats to their forest lands emerge, women are collectivising for community conservation practices as sustainable solutions to forest resources management and decision-making.
Governance
Women confront the challenges in accessing social security schemes and basic entitlements that prevent them from exercising their entitlements. Our women leadership programme is a platform for women’s access to social security schemes and governance procedures and to independently navigate the alien spaces of governance that made them vulnerable to layers of exploitation.
Occupational Health
Women from mine worker communities face multiple challenges of tuberculosis, silicosis and the vicious web of indebtedness, care giving, wage labour and migration. Our Barefoot Health programme works with adivasi communities in Ganj Basoda and Panna (Madhya Pradesh) to lobby for rehabilitation, prevention and building women’s agency of support at the community level.
Biodiversity &
Traditional Knowledge
Adivasi Women’s traditional ecological knowledge holds critical pathways to restoring local eco-systems, livelihoods and food security. Our programme builds collective synergy for exchanging knowledge practices and strategising to find local solutions to the challenges of climate change and development induced eco-systems destruction.
Forest-Based Livelihoods
Despite the distress of resource alienation, adivasi women come together to restore forest resources and local livelihoods through harnessing their NTFP and farming. Women are finding local solutions using traditional knowledge, renewables and local innovations for value addition of forest produce, kitchen gardens and micro enterprises.
Feminist Research
Dhaatri lobbies for gender equality and resource rights to women through feminist research like gender audits, gender impact assessment, thematic reports and working with local women for women-led action research, feminist ethnographies and story telling.
