IPHU (Savar) Participant Abstracts

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Stories of Activist Work
Jibhi CHAI and the ICDS programme in Banjar, Himachal Pradesh (Kaaren Mathias)
Protesting against the US Global War on Terror (Jeph Mathias)
UK Students Against Coke (Brendan Donegan)
The Ghana CSO Campaign on the Health MDGs (John Mahama)
Makkal Nalavazvu Iyakkam (Ameer Khan)
Médecins du Monde in Angola (Camila Giugliani)

Abstracts
Protesting against the US Global War on Terror (Jeph Mathias)
Jeph Mathias describes the genesis and development of protest against the USA’s global war of terror. His involvement starts with a spontaneous and spectacular protest against New Zealand involvement in the war then developed and broadened into networking with peace movements, interacting with the Mayor of his city and an event in the city square where a peace mural was painted. The culmination for Jeph was taking peace lessons with classes of 4-8 year old children.

Jibhi CHAI and the ICDS programme in Banjar, Himachal Pradesh (Kaaren Mathias)
In 1985 the Indian Government launched the ambitious Integrated Child Development Scheme. This programme was to address multiple areas of need in health, nutrition and education. The scheme includes pre-school facilities, growth monitoring and nutrition supplementation. It aims to include every child in India under the age of six years. Using child care centres (anganwaddi) a high calorie density meal should be provided to all attending children daily, as well as developmentally appropriate toys, monthly growth monitoring and nutritional supplementation as required. In many areas however the ICDS is under-resourced, poorly run and ineffective. It is a behemoth with generally poor results and incomplete implementation of service delivery. In Banjar block, Kullu,, Himachal Pradesh our small NGO, Jibhi Community Health Action Initiative (CHAI) has identified several effective anganwaddi and many others under-functioning and under-resourced. Our project is a work in progress - it is one of capacity building, monitoring and advocacy. It seeks primarily to support existing functionaries with added resources and staff– and thereby facilitating programme monitoring. Meetings with ICDS project staff, parents, children as well as independent growth monitoring provide opportunity for real life examples that can be used in advocacy and lobbying.

Limiting factors in our ICDS/ child nutrition project are related to public expectations, capacity and apathy. We struggle to balance the public and professional default ‘demand’ for service delivery by our NGO over time and resources invested in advocacy. There is an ongoing lack of skills among project staff in relationship building and advocacy with government officials. Other limitations include isolation, high rurality limiting programme reach, indifference and resistance by government officials and lack of true community participation and ownership of the monitoring and advocacy aspects of the programme.

UK Students Against Coke (Brendan Donegan)
The activist campaign I will describe is the UK Students Against Coke campaign. The objective of the campaign was to apply pressure on Coke to stop violating human rights, both in its efforts to prevent the formation of strong trade unions (particularly in Columbia) and in its activities in India. The UKSAC campaign began a couple of years ago and reached my university campus (Warwick University) in early 2006, at which point I got involved in the attempt to get the Warwick Students' Union to boycott Coca Cola. The focus of the campaign was to get a critical mass of Students' Unions to implement an institutional boycott of Coke (no Coke available on campus). The campaign ran up against the practical difficulties of replacing Coke when most SUs have a contract with a single provider of soft drinks and the only alternative provider with a strong distribution network is Pepsi (seen as equally problematic). Those people within SUs and the National Union of Students who were against the boycott of Coke used this argument and advocated the alternative strategy of constructive dialogue with Coke, an approach that Coke supported but showed no signs of taking seriously. However, to conclude that the UKSAC campaign failed is perhaps to miss the point that the UKSAC campaign represents a well-coordinated campaign organised by students that was successfully brought to many UK university campuses, in a context in which most UK students and student bodies (such as SUs and the NUS) are fairly apolitical and have been for the past decade. I would like to argue that if the UKSAC campaign got as far as it did then perhaps there is some hope for the future of student politics in the UK.

The Ghana CSO Campaign on the Health MDGs (John Mahama)
The Ghana Civil Society Campaign on the MDGs has its origins in the initiative launched in 2004 under the leadership of the Social Enterprise Development (SEND) Foundation of West Africa in partnership with the UN MDGs Secretariat. The campaign seeks to popularise the MDGs in Ghana; establish an understanding of Ghana’s status in the implementation of the MDGs; and monitor Ghana’s implementation of the MDGs. read more

Makkal Nalavazvu Iyakkam (Ameer Khan)
I have been involved with Makkal Nalavalvu Iyakkam (the Tamilnadu State chapter of Jana Swasthya Abhiyan (JSA)), since 2004. In this presentation, I am presenting the process of rejuvenating the MNI, during the period just before and following the National Health Assembly, as my case study. I was taken over as a co-convenor during this period and was involved in the conceptualization and implementation of this process. read more

Médecins du Monde in Angola (Camila Giugliani)
During one year (November 2005 – December 2006) I worked as a member of the MDM (French NGO) team in Angola. The program took place in the rural zone of the country, where the civil war, that had just ended, in 2002, had destroyed most of the infra-structure, including health services. The program I was working on focused on maternal-child health and nutrition, and the activities were directed to the training of local health professionals (Angolan nursing auxiliaries) working in the rural health posts. The MDM health team, composed of myself, two nurses, one midwife, and three Angolan nursing auxiliaries, organized regular supervision in health posts, some of them in remote zones. read more