Speeches Shim
Kavita, 27, got married at the age of 14 because her family could not afford to support her to finish high school. In 2019, Kavita joined Greenkraft, a producer-owned company supported by USAID India’s “Producer Owned Women Enterprises” (POWER) project. Through this partnership between USAID and the Industree Crafts Foundation under the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative, Kavita started out as a production line worker.
Sudha, 30, got married as a teenager before she could finish high school and quickly found herself a young homemaker with one daughter and few job skills. Her family struggled with making ends meet and kept falling into debt. After Sudha joined Greenkraft as a basket weaver, a producer-owned company supported by the USAID India “Producer Owned Women Enterprises” (POWER) project, she started earning a regular income with a benefits package including health insurance and social security.
Twenty-one-year old Phul Kumari, who is from Jharkhand, a state in the eastern part of India, is known as a “Girls’ Champion” in her home village. And for good reason! Raised in a poor family, she was married off immediately after her Class 10 examinations at just 16 years of age. Her husband was an abusive man and though she stayed in the marriage for three years, the physical and mental torture forced her to make the difficult decision to return to her mother’s house.
Rita Sahoo contracted polio during her childhood, when the disease still caused death and disability among large numbers of Indian children and adults. Sahoo was sent by her family to live in an ashram (residential facility) at the age of four. As she got older, the ashram refused to keep her and she had to return home, where she lived with her parents, two sisters, and brother.
B Chinmayee is a classical Indian dancer from Odisha, a state on India’s eastern coast. After she was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 2017, a bout of TB meningitis left her paralyzed in a hospital, where she subsequently suffered a miscarriage and discovered that the serious but treatable disease was only the beginning of her challenges.
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