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Goal: Towards building a more just and peaceful world, where everyone lives with dignity, respect, and equality

Our Achievements

Our Services

• Safety & Accessibility Audits Training

• Gender Friendly Public Spaces & Streets

• Gender Training

• Accessible WASH

• Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights

Harmonizing CEDAW with UNCRPD

• Women and girls with disabilities can access their rights with equality and justice

• Ensuring conducive and enabling environment is provided

• Are not discriminated

• “Be heard and Be seen” through awareness raising and sensitization forums

• They Must Rise Against Violence

Women with Disabilities Forum for Action has made an impact in lives of women with disabilities by introducing a standalone section in the National Policy of Persons with Disabilities notified by Government of India. In the entire policy, “gender lens” is provided to ensure Women with Disabilities are not left out of Law and governance reforms; health, water, sanitation, and nutrition, and social protection; education, skill development, livelihoods, and access to financial services; infrastructure, climate change, and disaster resilience; etc.

Due to Samarthyam’s advocacy efforts with Committee Members of Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) at United Nations, Geneva, for the first time in the history of CEDAW reporting, women with disabilities are included in the CEDAW Concluding Observation, 2014.

Samarthyam has been involved in numerous United Nations consultations on non-handicapping environment, gender equity and issues of women and girls with disabilities in the region.

National Level

International Level

Safety & Accessibility Audits Training

Women and girls with disabilities experience and fear various types of sexual violence in public spaces, from sexual harassment to sexual assault. It happens on streets, public transport and parks, in and around schools and workplaces, in public sanitation facilities and water and food distribution sites, or in their own neighborhoods.

Solutions

• To ensure safe and violence free access to all mainstream services and facilities, it is mandatory to conduct safety audits. Safe and accessible environment to ensure that women and girls with disabilities have access to all mainstream education, health, employment, transportation, information/communication and social security services which will enable them to live equally and with dignity.

• Samarthyam’s team of women with disabilities along with planners and architects undertakes safety audits of city spaces and transport terminuses to identify hotspots and unsafe areas.

• We provide training to organizations and individuals on accessibility and safety for girls and women in built and transport environments.

Focus

Technical knowhow on universal accessibility in planning, design and implementation in projects related to built-environment -gender friendly public spaces and streets.

How will this training benefit you?

The training on safety and accessibility audits will empower you to provide insight on inaccessible and unsafe environments and help girls and women to live life with dignity and safety.

Gender Friendly Public Spaces & Streets

Samarthyam disseminate and implement ‘Accessibility Awareness and Implementation Strategies’ through a novel model, which primarily focuses on promoting enabling environment with gender and accessibility lens. Our capacity building training is designed with modules covering both practical and theoretical aspects of universal accessibility and policy amendment issues covering common barriers / challenges faced, myths and facts on accessibility, disability specific regulations and techniques of customer service for enhanced satisfaction. Samarthyam’s team of women with disabilities along with planners and architects undertake safety audits of built-environment, city spaces and transport terminuses to identify hotspots and unsafe areas. We develop codes, manuals and guidelines on safe street designs and plans to ensure gender friendly public spaces.

Gender Training

Samarthyam facilitates Gender Training as a tool, strategy, and means to effect individual and collective transformation towards gender equality by raising awareness and encouraging learning, knowledge-building and skills development.

How will this training benefit you

Gender training is seen as a methodology of consciousness raising and empowerment of women with disabilities, individually or collectively, or as a way of making project design and implementation or service delivery more gender sensitive or as a means to effect institutional changes and reduce/combat gender based violence.

With the knowledge, appropriate policy, intervention can be designed to enhance women with disabilities status enabling them to take an equal place and to participate equally in the development process.

Accessible WASH

Making toilets and public conveniences accessible, friendly and safe for girls and women with disabilities is our focus area. We are the pioneers in standardizing the accessible toilet design in schools and public spaces. Our policy advocacy and design innovation have resulted in provision of accessible toilet design with universal design principles.

R2S – Right to Sanitation Campaign

Samarthyam’s pioneering effort to provide accessible Water, Sanitation, Hygiene (WASH) and development facilities and toilets for persons with disabilities, which are gender sensitive, age and disabled friendly. The aim is “Make the Right Real and promote Right to Sanitation for All”. Samarthyam celebrates 19th November “World Toilet Day” and creates awareness on availability of accessible & functional WASH facilities in schools, public spaces and household toilets.

Persons with disabilities, women, girls and socially excluded communities are the worst sufferers of this neglect too. More specifically, the government of India data shows serious gaps with a huge number of toilets not existing on the ground and/or massive gaps between what has been provisioned and actual numbers. This issue of ‘missing toilets’ in rural India and ‘toilet crisis’ in urban areas need immediate attention of one and all.

Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR)

Samarthyam, Women with Disabilities Forum for Action believes that for sustainable development, women and girls with disabilities must have the freedom, the power, and the support to demand and access their sexual and reproductive rights.