The Problem

There are thousands of NGOs and Agencies working towards Women’s Empowerment in India. Many of them provide services like Legal Help, Counselling, Education & Training, Employment Opportunities, Short Stay Homes, etc to women and girls who are in distress. There is information about them available on the Internet but most of the content is outdated and needs to be verified on a regular cycle. A few months ago, I put up a helplines map here, and started calling up the numbers and verifying, gathering more information. Soon some of my friends joined and together we were able to verify about 50 information sets. Then I thought..

The Solution

Why not invite everyone! And that’s exactly what we are going to do now. The steps to verify are quite simple and if you visit the helplines map you can see that the information is neatly available in a well categorized and searchable format. So lets walk through the steps quickly:

Step 1: The Unverified Information (a.k.a Bleh!)

These are the snippets of Information available on the Web. Usually has a couple of phone numbers, sometimes just an address and in most of the cases, just the name of the organization. For Stage 1, our focus will be on verifying the contact numbers and gathering more information from them that can fill up the form below.

Step 2: YOU (a.k.a Changemakers!)

If you are on facebook, You can collect your Bleh! From our facebook Events Page. Just Join In and you can meet others who are in the event. If you are not on facebook, Join the Newsletter group with your email address and you will be provided with the information. I request all to join the newsletter group so that we can keep you posted on the progress on a weekly basis and inform you about future verification events if you are interested.

Once you have Information, you can call up the NGO and collect details based on the form that is given below.  

If Possible, you can provide your phone number to the NGO so that they can call you up if there is any change in information and you can pass on the information to us via our email group. This would be very helpful as it creates a link and will help in the re-verification process.

Step 3: The information you provide will be mapped onto the helplines map. And once we have verified about 500 NGOs, we will make the information available online as well through an Android App. At a later stage, we will make the information available through SMS queries as well based on the victim’s location.

Guidelines:

1.       It would be useful to have the form below in front of you while making the call and you can fill in the information as you talk to them.

Please feel free to add any other information in the comments and feedback section.

Thank You for verifying the Information. Kindly fill this form to submit your data