We found a great opportunity to bring mental health to rural areas along with our incredible partners Uridu and Correlaid. We already have strong digital connections with our rural digital champions who are active leaders and change makers in their communities. We thought about discussing mental health with them, when Corelaid provided us with a short and easy digital mental health survey.

As a country deeply impacted by climate change, carbon emissions and menstrual waste, we thought we could play a role and design a solution with our existing partners. We knew that menstrual education without addressing product demands was an insufficient approach.

When Berlin based organisation The Do put out a global call to action, we reached out to Sindh Rural Support Organization (SRSO), which had already supported us spreading awareness, training rural menstrual champions and bringing digital literacy and virtual menstrual education into the rural areas. Together, we worked on launching first -ever Raaji Reusable Pads Prototype.

Dr Ayesha Khan met with around 40 participants including menstrual champions, both Raaji Room leaders and rural women. She discussed menstruation health, and the link between ovulation, fertility, pregnancy, and childbirth. She also highlighted hormonal imbalances and menstruation problems such as Endometriosis and PCOS, and how they affect ovulation and pregnancy.

Within a month, audio lessons in the Listening Parties had reached nearly ten villages. All of this was made possible by our first Cohort, which consisted of ten rural community leaders. We taught them how to use digital tools and provided them with data plans and menstruation kits during the first Digital Literacy training.

To replicate this form of knowledge in other villages of Sindh, we hosted a Digital Literacy training with Cohort 2 on 3rd September, 2021 with the support of ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen), Uridu and our field partner, SRSO.

Unfortunately, when it comes to having nutritious meals, girls and women in our country, particularly in rural regions, receive less attention than boys. Males are thought to contribute to the family's financial well-being, and this might be the fact that they are given a larger healthier portion of the food. However, we frequently overlook this fact that females and their reproductive health contribute to the development of a healthy future generation.

While listening parties with our audio menstrual health content are progressing and spreading at speed offline in rural Sindh, the digital inclusion and learning from Raaji Rooms is allowing them to happen online as well. We had our first Virtual Listening Party on menstrual problems and disorders.

Considering rural areas often don’t have internet infrastructure to use our chatbot Raaji, we realised that there was an opportunity in designing audio menstrual health content that could be downloadable and available offline to hear and learn from. So, we designed a new form of engaging with that content when we launched our concept of listening parties.

The success of Raaji Rooms led us towards building the digital capacity of other community leaders. We strongly believe that rural girls and women have enough potential to grow digitally. We took this opportunity and organized a full-day Digital Literacy Training which was held at Sindh Rural Support Organisation (SRSO) Complex Sukkur on 26th July. This was a combined effort of Uridu and Aurat Raaj, supported by ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) and facilitated by SRSO, our incredible field partner.

Raaji Rooms was originally created with the goal of providing digitally inclusive learning centers and safe spaces for rural women and girls seeking a long-term digital solution for their socio-cultural, economic, and health recovery following the pandemic. Now we thought it was time to test whether our Raaji Room leader, Uzma from village Dundh was ready to lead digital interventions to educate her community's adolescents.

The session ran for around two hours in the Raaji Room at Wahid Bux Gopang village. Urbeli spearheaded the session and introduced Raaji the chatbot. She used a smartphone and showed an offline video of Raaji The Chatbot to the girls.

Continuing with its tradition of arranging informative seminars and workshops, Aurat Raaj recently organized an online session to raise awareness about menstrual education and to train the youth for its advocacy.

The individuals from the rural area were enthusiastic to speak up and share personal stories and traditions that they had grown up hearing. Then, with the help of our technology-driven curriculum - Raaji animated series and AI Chatbot, we were able to increase the rural womens’ engagement and attention.

Some female staff members spoke out about their experiences with rural communities, stating that the majority of rural women use cloth for the absorption of menstrual blood. The male staff also agreed with our stance on menstrual education.

Mothers in rural areas are not educated enough to share menstrual hygiene knowledge with their daughters. In rural areas, girls are supposed to leave school after their menarche as they are meant to get married after the initial months of menstruation.