Sampada Gramin Mahila Sanstha (SANGRAM) is a voluntary organization that works at the grassroots level with activists, volunteers and paid workers. It is slowly gaining importance as a practical training ground for other NGO’s and GO’s interested in working on HIV/AIDS in a rural context. SANGRAM started its work with women in prostitution and sex work from South Maharashtra and North Karnataka in 1992 and has since fanned out among diverse populations. SANGRAM is based in Sangli district, which has the highest incidence of HIV/AIDS in Maharashtra after Mumbai.
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The peer intervention
One settlement in one town: from this small beginning in 1992, the peer education programme has grown to span six districts in Maharashtra and the border areas of North Karnataka. About 120 peer educators drop off 350,000 condoms to 5,500 women each month. These women include devadasis, streetwalkers, and housewives in sex work, "flying" sex workers working in different locations, brothel keepers, PLHA etc.
The locations that the peer education programme spans are as diverse as the women themselves. They range from small hutments to sturdy homes in industrial centres like Karad, where household women turn to prostitution and sex work on market days. They include textile towns like Ichalkaranji, popularly known as the Manchester of India, and truck stops like Pethnaka on national highway no 4, where women from nearby villages work from midnight to dawn. They cover dhabas and cloth cabins, brothels and lodges.
Unlike programmes that view sex workers as carriers of HIV, SANGRAM’s peer education programme sees a woman in prostitution and sex work as an individual who can be empowered to become an agent of change for herself and her community. This vision is based on two underlying premises:
It frames HIV within a context of sexuality, gender and rights. For instance, condoms are viewed as life-saving equipment that women in prostitution and sex work must have access to – by right. Workers are trained on issues such as law, inheritance, property rights and other gendered issues related to HIV.
VAMP
When the peer education programme began in 1992, it was run by SANGRAM. Since 1996, the peer intervention has been run by VAMP, a collective of women in prostitution and sex work. As part of its responsibilities, VAMP runs and manages the peer intervention in the six districts where it began: Sangli, Satara, Kolhapur, Solapur, Bagalkot, Belgaum. “Once VAMP was formed, we actually decided to close down SANGRAM.” But the women perceived it as abandonment. “They would tell us, 'Because we are sex workers, you want us to form our own organization and work on our own,' recalls SANGRAM staff.
VAMP members – all of whom are women in prostitution and sex work – said they felt comfortable managing the community on their own, but needed help with back-office work: writing proposals, managing accounts, dealing with the Charity Commissioner etc. “We will manage the community at all levels and only come to you in a crisis,” VAMP members told SANGRAM staff. It was then decided that the two organizations should collaborate – with each bringing its strengths and meeting the other’s needs.
Women in prostitution and sex work are champions at orally keeping track of money and handling salary and other disbursals – but putting it on paper is another story. “The women are scared of paperwork.” “They need to learn that they don’t need to be scared – but this is an alien space for them.” An earlier attempt to train the women did not work. “The energy dipped.” Now, for each project that VAMP runs, its members select a co-ordinator who will put their words on paper.
Reading, writing, and doing paperwork is a need that women in prostitution and sex work often need help with, simply because many of them have never been to school. But not being able to read or write does not mean that they cannot think. Working from its philosophy of building capacities, SANGRAM proposed a unique solution to the paperwork problem: