India gets funding for 17 women, children healthcare projects
New Delhi, June 1: In a major initiative to improve healthcare for women and children in low and middle-income groups, 100 innovators in developing nations, including 17 in India, will receive a seed grant of 100,000 Canadian dollars each, it was announced on Friday.
Funded by Grand Challenges Canada, with financial support from the Canadian government, the ideas to develop and test innovations aimed at addressing persistent challenges.
Grand Challenges Canada announced an investment of over 10 million Canadian dollars to develop and test innovations delivered by social enterprises, non-profit organisations, research institutes, universities, foundations and hospitals.
Over 4 million dollars is dedicated to 44 projects addressing sexual and reproductive health and rights, putting Canada's Feminist International Assistance Policy into action.
Proposed by institutions in Canada and abroad, the bold ideas embrace a range of creative solutions to empower the lives and improve the health of some of the world's poorest and most vulnerable women and children in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe.
A total of 17 projects in India received grants to develop and test innovations aimed at addressing persistent challenges in women and children's healthcare.
The Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre is looking to assist rural women in India with the creation of a personalised, accessible, data-driven, women-centric strategy for sexual and reproductive wellness and clinical care in the form of a wearable pendant.
This technology will track health data on menstruation, clinical signs, symptoms, body temperature and heart rate and display information with different coloured emojis.
The wearable pendant connects to a smartphone app to deliver wellness indicators to nearby clinical providers, where women can access self-controlled, high-quality tailored health services, using data to inform smart choices.
Such choices will inform their reproductive and sexual lives and reduce morbidity and mortality.
The All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Jodhpur aims to empower adolescents.
It says adolescents in India face barriers to accurate and constructive information about sexual and reproductive health and rights.
The "flipped classroom" provides sexual and reproductive health information via mobile app and allows students to study the material privately at home.
Class time is then used for questions, deeper learning, analysis, clarification and discourse with a skilled facilitator.
So is detection and monitoring heart disease in underserved women in India by Audicor Cardiometrics Pvt. Ltd.
The company has a tool which non-invasively provides four biomarkers of heart disease, in 10 seconds, and can be done at point of care in rural remote settings, for about one-third of the cost of traditional heart failure diagnostic services.
Non-profit organisation ARMMAN is implementing and testing a free teleservice in which counsellors guide parents of 960 children in Mumbai and New Delhi with severe acute malnutrition through direct calls on food, health and nutrition.
About six million young mothers in India face post-partum depression annually and as a result 20,000 women commit suicide, says BEMPU Health Pvt Ltd.
Its project aims to develop and test Bhappy; a low-cost screening tool for postpartum depression that is usable on any standard smartphone and categorises mothers as healthy, at-risk or needs attention in order for nurses to connect mothers to clinical assistance as required.
Remote parts of Indian mountainous states like Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand are still facing age-old menstruation taboos that force menstruating women to inhabit cramped sheds away from their homes.
Nyaya Health Nepal will combat this practice called Chaupadi in the Himalayan country.
Despite recent progressive healthcare policies, over 10 million Nepalis lack access to healthcare, due to fragmented infrastructures, a decade-long civil war, and the 2015 earthquake.
In India, women in many remote parts of the hill states are virtually ex-communicated when they are menstruating.
They are forced to sleep outside the house, in cattle-like sheds known as menstruation sheds.
The reason: A woman is considered "unclean" when she's bleeding or in a post-natal state.
The so-called "unclean" women, during their periods and after childbirth, are barred from touching cattle or men and they are even denied access to toilets, walking miles from their villages daily to take a bath.
Over the past seven years, Grand Challenges Canada's "Stars in Global Health" programme has provided $70 million Candian dollars to 661 projects, implemented in 87 low and middle-income countries over nine rounds of funding since 2011.
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Jaishankar concludes Trinidad visit; highlights cultural links, development partnerships
Port of Spain (PTI): External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar highlighted India's close cultural and historical ties with Trinidad and Tobago as he concluded his visit to the Caribbean nation with a series of engagements focused on diaspora outreach and development cooperation.
Jaishankar on Saturday interacted with members of the Indian community and underlined the “special bonds” shared with the Girmitya community, descendants of Indian indentured labourers who had migrated to the Caribbean during the colonial era.
"Concluded my visit with an interaction with the Indian community. Underlined the special bonds with the Girmitya community and discussed nurturing it further," he said in a social media post.
Jaishankar said India is a “reliable and trusted partner”, responsive to the needs and aspirations of Trinidad and Tobago.
According to the website of the Indian High Commission here, approximately 143,000 indentured workers from the Indian subcontinent migrated to Trinidad between 1845 and 1917. A vast majority of these Indian emigrants came from northern India and Bihar.
The descendants of those indentured workers, now in their fifth or sixth generation, form nearly 40-45 per cent of the total population of 1.36 million (as of 2024), constituting an integral part of the country's economic, political, and social fabric, it states.
Jaishankar had arrived in Port of Spain from Paramaribo on Friday on the concluding leg of his three-nation tour of Jamaica, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago, aimed at deepening India’s engagement with the Caribbean nations.
Earlier on Saturday, Jaishankar visited the Dattatreya Mandir, where he offered prayers for the well-being of the people and for stronger India-Trinidad and Tobago relations.
The Dattatreya Mandir is a prominent Hindu temple in central Trinidad known for housing an 85-foot statue of Lord Hanuman.
In another post on X, the minister described his interaction with the Indo-Trinbagonian community in South Trinidad as a “home away from home”.
“A real pleasure to be among the Indo-Trinbagonian community in South Trinidad. The kinship was expressed in so many ways. And the affection, in even more,” he said, while thanking Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar for the experience.
Jaishankar also launched a permanent prosthetics centre in Penal town jointly with Persad-Bissessar, following the success of India's Jaipur Foot camp in the country that benefited over 800 persons with disabilities.
The Jaipur Foot is a low-cost prosthetic limb initiative that has helped thousands of differently-abled people across the world regain mobility.
Describing the prosthetics centre as a “people-centric project”, Jaishankar, in a social media post, said it is a "gift of mobility and dignity for Trinidad and the wider CARICOM (Caribbean Community and Common Market) region."
