Dharma Life

Dharma life is a distributor partner accountable for developing sustainable livelihood for women using the entrepreneur model via sale of sanitary napkins in the two districts of Bihar- Munger and Bhagalpur.

As one of the five tiers of the MHM programme, Dharma Life’s role includes:

• Establishing and strengthening a robust network of women entrepreneurs at village level
• Creating linkages between awareness and supply of sanitary napkin via entrepreneur network
• Procuring stock and managing distribution of sanitary napkins
• Developing purchasing and selling capacity of women entrepreneurs
• Ensuring sustainable sale of sanitary napkins at village level

Step 1: Identification, recruitment and training of Dharma Life Entrepreneurs

Dharma Life’s model of intervention include recruitment of an Area Channel Manager at State level (overall in charge for end to end implementation of the project), an Enterprise Leader at the district level (for operation and execution of project) and several community development officers (CDO’s for handholding, training and execution of the project) at cluster level responsible for 10-15 DLEs each.

To identify and recruit the DLEs, interventions have been designed at 3 levels:

• Active alignment and involvement with the partner organizations: Dharma Life’s team collaborated with the partner organizations to conduct “identification and recruitment of DLE” at village level. The implementation team followed the partner organizations while they were conducting their awareness programs first in Munger district during phase one (January 2015) and later in Bhagalpur district during the second phase of the intervention (January 2016). The partner organizations would conduct awareness workshops on MHM followed by Dharma Life giving a presentation on DLE model to the same audience. Our field team in Munger and Bhagalpur actively worked to conduct several presentations on the DLE model. Women who were a part of these trainings were then educated on becoming an Entrepreneur. Benefits of working as an entrepreneur alongside their full time/part time/seasonal/no jobs is shared with the target audience. Interested women are identified based on established recruitment criteria by our team to receive further training on becoming a successful entrepreneur.

• Liaised with SHGs and Joint liability group (JLG): Secondly, to engage more women, Dharma Life worked with SHGs and JLG’s at the village level. Our team members conducted a presentation on DLE model to educate and motivate women who were active members of SHG and JLG. They were given descriptive presentation on our entrepreneur model and a dashboard of all the motived women from SHG and JLG is prepared by our team for recruitment and training.

• Meeting with key opinion leaders in the village: Dharma Life engaged in interacting with the influential leaders of the community. These leaders also included men who would influence their wives, mothers or daughters to become a DLE.

Step 2: Training the selected women to become Dharma Life Entrepreneurs (DLEs)

After the identification and recruitment, Dharma Life engages those women entrepreneurs in a 3-day training programme:

• 3 Day Training Workshop: Dharma Life has two training models and both the models focus on empowering women by becoming agents change at home and in their respective communities. The idea behind creating a women entrepreneur network is to foster a force of women who are able to economically support themselves and their families and at the same time support social causes to uplift their communities. “Tejasvani and Saksham” are two interactive, participative and all-encompassing training models focusing on the following:
• Establish our identity as “Tejasvani” and “Saksham”
• Understand who is an entrepreneur and how does it help him/her in creating sustainable livelihoods
• Train and build capacity in: understanding target audience, the need of the audience, the skill set required to discuss products with the audience, finance and sales management, stock keeping, how to aggregate demand, product training, inventory training, calculation of profit and loss, etc.
• Train DLEs on importance of menstrual hygiene and menstrual hygiene products available.
• Handhold team in conducting small level interactive meeting with consumers
• Team alignment with CDOs, EL and ACM
• Share distribution strategy and investment model

• Product awareness and linkage to market: To enhance the distribution of sanitary napkin and consequently earning capacity of DLEs we provide them with product knowledge, on awareness generation campaigns, demand aggregation, margins, inventory management, book-keeping, stocking etc.

• Mapping of DLE at cluster and district level: Once the training is over each DLE is assigned a CDO for communication and handholding in selling the product. CDOs also assist DLE’s to organize small group interactive meetings.

Step 3: Distribution of Sanitary Napkins

• Ensuring last mile availability of sanitary napkins: To ensure the accessibility of sanitary napkin to the last consumer, Dharma Life follows a robust “distributor model”. The DLEs aggregate the demand at the community level via various one to one or small group meetings. This demand is further shared with dharma life hierarchical network from CDO to EL and then to the local distributor. A ledger is maintained by the CDO, EL to keep the records of supply of sanitary napkins. Dharma Life doesn’t promote credit model for DLEs because of complex collection and follow up process. Below are some communication tools used by Dharma Life to ensure last mile availability of sanitary napkins:
• Identifying and mapping target audience at village level via one on one interaction: DLEs at the village level identify and map select target audience and reach out to them via one on one interaction. In most cases, these women have attended MHM sessions conducted by partner organizations. However, our DLEs engage the target audience on MHM and discuss why women bleed, how to manage periods hygienically and disposal of sanitary napkins. Our “Tejasvani” and “Saksham” model encourages women entrepreneurs in building interpersonal skills to educate, reinforce and motivate the community.
• Conducting Small Group Interactive Meeting with women and girls: The women entrepreneurs also engage in conducting various small group interactive meeting with 12-15 women in the community. These meetings are organized by the DLEs to create awareness on MHM via our “female hygiene” module using communication tools such as sharing personal testimonies about their first period and how they manage it, biological progression in a woman’s body and hygienic ways to manage periods, followed by promoting usage of sanitary napkins. This leads to aggregating demand at the community level.
• Selling sanitary napkins to small scale village level shops: Dharma Life entrepreneur model encourages shopkeepers to become DLEs, however in villages where shopkeepers are not DLE’s, the DLE network tries to trade the sanitary napkins to the shopkeepers.
• Reaching out to adolescent girls via School meetings: DLEs also reach out to medium or high school girls who are made aware by partner organizations on MHM. DLEs further generate awareness on the availability of sanitary napkins while capturing their addresses and contact numbers for trading the same. The aggregated demand is then shared by teacher with the DLEs who later work as a point of purchase for the adolescent girls. Several such interactions lead to building a robust consumer network.
• Participating in local mohalla/community meetings: For increased interaction and visibility in the community, DLEs also participate in local mohalla/community meetings.