Diabetes is on the rise in women and along with it serious complications like Heart disease, stroke and kidney disease.
DIWWAAAS, the NGO working on prevention and care of diabetes in girls and women is organising a 2 day workshop to sensitize all key stakeholders regarding awareness and advocacy strategies.
The lives of Girls and Women have changed considerably over the past few decades. Urbanization, globalization, care giving, poverty, low literacy, changing eating habits, physical inactivity, rising obesity, balancing traditional and non-traditional practices and stress have made women more susceptible to many chronic conditions, particularly diabetes and related NCDs. A health sector only approach often does not help in prevention and addressing the social determinants of health and partnering with all the stakeholders [non health sector and health sector] is a low hanging fruit.
This workshop is designed to bring the most serious, determined and result oriented experts in twenty four multi sectoral areas, together to expand the dialogue, build bridges, find solutions and make progress. By addressing prevention of diabetes and its environmental determinants and complications in girls and women, we believe an entire cascade of benefits will follow. Comprehensive focus on health promoting environments and policies, along with healthy eating, physical activity, stress reduction, weight management, blood pressure and lipid control, can translate to prevention of many other NCDs.
We intend to target the health of Young girls, especially adolescents, for we believe in our equation that Healthy girls= Healthy women= Healthy moms= Healthy families. Pre conception, Pregnancy and the Post-partum period are great windows of opportunity for health promotion that will benefit women during and after their reproductive period and help in prevention of diabetes and other NCDs, for generations to come. We believe that Next generations matter.
The two day program will be informative and interactive, addressing global and local challenges. The topics and the panellists have been carefully curated to bring a life course approach to the entire discourse. Our goal is to make diabetes prevention a top priority through smart and sustainable solutions where activism, awareness, coalitions, success stories, public private partnerships, community participation and advocacy come together. Together, we commit to take actions as multiple stakeholders at this first consultation, this year and come back to share outcomes of our actions, next year.
By targeting diabetes, we will be able to address multiple risk factors for many NCDS, especially heart disease in women.
Dr. Usha Sriram
