Participants

Kathleen Li  

I had a semester-long internship in rural India working on issues of public and preventive health. My primary focus was on developing scalable awareness strategies for prevention of diarrhea, jaundice, dental cavities, leucorrhea, and anemia. To do this, I surveyed households and self-help groups to assess current knowledge gaps in preventive health and used this information to design a poster on Hepatitis A prevention tailored to local customs. Additionally, I collaborated with Chirag staff in working with village health committees to improve ground-level implementation of the National Rural Health Mission. While I was there, I noticed that the communities I was working in spent a few hours each day on household laundry, so I designed and built a pedal-powered washing machine with local artisans to introduce an affordable, time-saving, productivity boosting technology for rural families, especially women.