Organization

Accomplishment

On HIV/AIDS
Having been initiated work on HIV/AIDS in 1991 in Rajasthan with support from American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR), USA GBS has successfully implemented number of Projects on awareness and education, treatment of STIs/RTIs, care and support for the women and children affected/infected with HIV/AIDS in collaboration with following international agencies:

EUK NGO AIDS Consortium, London, U.K.
The British ODA. (Now DFID), U.K.
The John D. and Catherine T. Mac Arthur Foundation, USA
Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation
Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research (WHO), Geneva
World AIDS Foundation, Paris, France
Mercury Phoenix Trust, Geneva, Switzerland
HIVOS, The Netherlands
UNAIDS

Environment
GBS has been working on protection and improvement of environment with a focus on wastelands development. A project initiated in 1991 near a small village Todaladi on the foothills of Aravallis in the remote of district Jaipur is a mile stone in this direction.

It has appreciated widely at national and international levels and got some prestigious awards including 'Ford Conservation and Environment Award' and 'Indira Priydarshani Vrikshamitra Puraskar'.

With a thick forest of over 80,000 plants of various species of fuel, fodder, fruits, timber, shadow and flowers etc. and devices of rain water harvesting, soil and moisture conservation, sand dunes stabilization, regeneration of indigenous plant species etc. it was selected by UNDP as one of the best practices on wastelands development.

Women's empowerment
With the object of empowering the rural women GBS has been implementing many activities including raising awareness, providing them with legal literacy, protecting their human rights, prevention of domestic violence and other kinds of atrocities against women and girls etc.

During past 5 years our focus has been on mobilizing these poor rural women to form Self Help Groups (SHG) and motivating them to make small savings and depositing in the Bank accounts opened in the name of their groups and getting support from the banks as soft loans for their petty household needs.

During a period of 4 years 440 SHG have been formed involving over 4,000 rural women. The one year saving of these SHGs was INR 15, 00, 000 (equivalent to US $ 27,000) and they got a soft loan worth Rs. 1 crore ($ 250,000) in 2006 which is a record in the area. This way the poor women were emancipated from exploitation of local money lenders.

Now attempts are being made to provide these rural women with non formal education and vocational training and involve them in various kinds of income generating activities in order to make them economically self reliant and upgrade their status in family and society as well.

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