Stanford Health Policy is a joint effort of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford School of Medicine
An 8-Point Plan to Tackle COVID-19 Among Women in Mumbai Slums
“We’ve never been closer to each other or to those we serve," says Health Policy PhD candidate Suhani Jalota, founder of the Myna Mahila Foundation, a Mumbai-based women’s health and employment nonprofit. Its mission is to create the next generation of women leaders in urban slum communities — but COVID-19 isn't making it easy.
Illustration by Irene Servillo
Suhani Jalota, a PhD health policy candidate who is also working on her MBA at the Graduate School of Business, founded the Myna Mahila Foundation to help women in Mumbai’s slums overcome the stigma of menstruation.
In India, a nationwide lockdown was announced in mid-March because of the pandemic. A lot of Myna Mahila’s regular activities had to be paused, but being based in the heart of the epidemic in some of Mumbai’s densest slums, we had a responsibility to provide relief to families there.
"It’s very challenging for the government and most external organizations to support vulnerable populations in the slums, since diseases spread quickly in these hotspots," Jalota says in this GSB story. "And now that they’re sealed off, with no travel allowed to or from them, it’s become very difficult to gain access.
"So we created an eight-point plan to tackle COVID-19. We provide sanitary napkins and food and ration relief, reaching more than 8,000 girls and providing these essential food kits to more than 60,000 people (and counting). We have also repurposed our sanitary napkin manufacturing to produce face masks for people in the slums by empowering unemployed women at home to use their stitching machines. We’ve manufactured and distributed more than 7,500 face masks in less than a month."
read more
Commentary
Millions of Children at Risk of Measles as Vaccination Campaigns Take Back Seat to COVID-19
SHP's Eran Bendavid Warns that millions of young children around the world are at risk of missing their measles vaccines as health-care workers focus on COVID-19.
News
Stanford Works With California Prisons to Test and Prevent COVID-19
A $1 million gift from the Horowitz Family Foundation allows Stanford researchers to work on reducing the spread of COVID-19 among the incarcerated and inform mitigation strategies in other high-density living situations.
News
Preparing for Infectious Diseases, Natural Disasters and Terrorist Attacks
The CDC called on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to develop a set of national, evidence-based guidelines for public health emergency preparedness and response. The recommendations are in.