The entire audience was silent after watching Sunitha Krishnan’s powerful TEDIndia talk on the issue of child sex trafficking in India in November this year.  People needed time to digest her message.

She spoke about the organisation Prajwala she began almost 15 years ago in Hyderabad, India, and its mission of helping trafficked children.  Prajwala finds, extracts, and supports women who are trafficked into prostitution as children. I visited her and Prajwala in Hyderabad after the conference to speak to her to understand more about it.

In conversation she displayed an intense, resolute determination, and selfless pride in the activities of the organisation.  She described a multipronged approach aimed at helping these children by providing equal parts psychological support, civic support, and vocational support. She made it clear that none of these approaches alone could achieve the desired outcome, which was full reintegration into their community.

Her organisation worked to table, and have civic compensation legislation for trafficked children passed through Andra Pradesh state parliament to enable their civic rehabilition.  This, she described, was crucial to having the children recognise themselves as victims rather than perpetrators, and crucially, have that same mindshift occur in the communities they were re-entering.

In addition, Prajwala has set up seventeen schools, educating the children through all stages of primary and secondary education.  I visited one of these schools and spoke to a few of the teenage girls, one of which was now in university completing a Bachelor of Commerce.

On the same grounds, they had vocational training workshops in metalwork and woodwork, and were running a printing enterprise. One of the most difficult aspects to deal with was the fact that approximately one out of three girls had contracted HIV prior to their arrival at Prajwala, and medical support was a significant challenge.

Sunitha has suffered both threatened and real physical abuse from the vested interests in child trafficking.  She has been attacked in fourteen separate incidents, and at the time of our meeting, was waiting for an operation required to fix her hearing, from a recent attempt on her life.

The consequences of Prajwala’s work is inspiring.  Over 3,500 children have received support, 600 of which have gone on to marry and have 46 children, who she affectionately described as her grandchildren.  This, by anyone’s standards, is a big achievement.

Watch her talk above to hear it in her own words.

Furniture made by the women at Prajwala

]]> http://www.ppeach.com/blog/2009/12/sunitha-krishnan-and-prajwala-fighting-for-trafficked-children/feed/ 17 http://www.ppeach.com/blog/2009/11/bribebusters-com/ http://www.ppeach.com/blog/2009/11/bribebusters-com/#comments Sat, 28 Nov 2009 17:22:42 +0000 Pieter http://www.ppeach.com/blog/?p=456
This is inspiration, purified. Pick a root cause of much of India’s beaurocratic and economic pain, and wrap a simple business model around providing a solution to it.

What you get is a company providing anti-corruption services to people experiencing roadblocks in their dealings with bribery ridden government departments.  This is gold.

This social enterprise is the brainchild of Shaffi Mather and his partners out of India, and I saw him present their idea at TEDIndia in November this year.  Shaffi’s legitimacy in this space includes his qualification as a lawyer, property developer, and founder of 1298 Ambulance, a cross-subsidy model social enterprise successfully making ambulance services available to the people of Mumbai.

He had realised that the cost of providing people with help in tackling bribery, utilising existing Right to Information legislation, was significantly less than the cost of the bribes being requested. Instant business model, with a ready market (~$1 trillion). Just add chutzpah.

Best part is this. On stage, his flippant remark “We could call it something like bribebusters.com…”, led to an email that night by an international paper requesting an interview with him about this “BribeBusters.com” they’d seen mentioned on the twitter backchannel of the TED event.  1. He hadn’t registered the domain name.  2. He didn’t know whether a company with this name already existed. 3. He immediately registered the (surprisingly) vacant domain name once he recovered from his brief panic, fearing a defamation suit from an existing company.

Whether it will be called Stop Bribery and Prevent Corruption, or BribeBusters.com, its a great story. Listen to his talk below.