Our 2016 Autumn Newsletter looks at our work in Malawi

At the heart of all of Find Your Feet’s work is partnership.

We work in partnership with local organisations, and we work in partnership with local people, providing opportunities for them to make their voices heard. We ask the people we support to help us understand their needs, and allow their opinions to shape the work we do.

They farm the land, gather produce from the forest, go to market, rear livestock, bring up children and maintain the family home. Yet Adivasi women are not equally represented in community discussion and local decision making.

Find Your Feet has been working in Talamai’s village since 2009, helping to set up support groups for local women. The support groups provide training and information on public services, and support local women to lobby for their rights.

One of the Find Your Feet team, Lynn, has just visited Zimbabwe to meet some of the families we work with to grow more food, earn more income and to speak out against injustice. 

It’s World Hunger Day on 28^th May. This year, speaking out against hunger and injustice is even more important. Southern Africa is in the grip of a severe El Niño-induced drought. As a result, in Zimbabwe half of the country's rural population will need assistance by next year with rain not expected for several months. Already, nearly five million people are facing food shortages.

We know that there can be no such thing as sustainable development without the voices of women and girls.

The new Sustainable Development Goals recognise the importance of achieving gender equality if we are to reduce poverty. Attempts to meet the needs of women and girls through development programmes have led to improvements in recent years; laws to protect women’s rights have been enacted in many countries, more girls go to school and female life expectancy has increased for example.

But the reality is that gender inequality is still alive and well. Across the world billions of women and girls still face discrimination, poverty and violence just because of their gender.

Two members of our team, Hannah and Sherona, recently visited Nepal to meet some of the families that we work with. On meeting a local women’s group in Baijapur, they asked if any of the women would be happy to share their story, to take back to Find Your Feet’s supporters in the UK. Mina’s hand shot straight up.

Find Your Feet is helping pregnant women in India to demand their right to essential medical care. Beronika lives in an extremely poor and remote village in Jharkhand, India, where healthcare is very limited. When she found out she was pregnant, she knew that both the pregnancy and the birth could be dangerous, and she faced months of uncertainty and worry.

Find Your Feet started working in Beronika's village in 2014, engaging local people and providing them with information on the government services available to them. Beronika had been unaware that she was entitled to free medical care from the government. Thanks to Find Your Feet she had the opportunity to acccess the care she needed, and in the summer of this year she gave birth, in a hospital, to a healthy baby girl named Meenu.

You may not think fish, bananas and sugar cane go together but for a small group of family farmers in Malawi it’s the perfect mix. By joining together and making creative use of the natural resources around them, these farmers are preventing hunger and boosting their families’ income. Find out more about their solution.

Each day thousands of brick kiln workers in India are exploited at work. They face back breaking labour in dangerous, dirty conditions with low wages that leave whole families in poverty. Find Your Feet has just finished a four year project and now the Brick Kiln workers need your support – find out how you can free them from poverty and exploitation.

International Women's Day is celebrated on Sunday 8th March and provides the opportunity to call for change and celebrate acts of courage and determination by women, like Najibunisa from India, who have played an extraordinary role in bringing change to their community. Find out how the women in our projects will be marking the occasion.