Inspiration
As we headed onto the opening ceremony on MERGExIndia's twitch, where Jitendra Shah, discussed his own research on the environmental crisis as well as medical in India. There we connected ideas on a need for universal healthcare to how to combat stigma against women and trans people's hygiene, by discussing how globalization has played a role behind the need to keep old customs and traditions alive.
What it does
Our policy brief and purpose, addresses policies that can be implemented to solve the stigma surrounding the health of women and trans people in India. As well as better organizing health forms, to better manage time and resources with the toll of COVID- 19. Also addressing the toll covid has taken on daily wage workers, and policies to implement to provide them with jobs, so they can provide money to their family.
How we built it
After the opening ceremony, someone pinged the team formation desk about team members who chose policy. There we became the max team of five and communicated our ideas through a shared doc, as well as through discord. After brainstorming problems and policies to such, using a check system, we chose upon stigma surrounding women's hygiene, reevaluating health forms to better organize and mandate resources, as well as the effects on COVID- 19 in India along the general daily wage work force, who require jobs to provide for their families.
Challenges we ran into
Some challenges we ran into were what issues to best discuss, as well as how we'd address the issues we decided on during the brainstorming. Some people in the team had differing opinions on which topics should be discussed due to their own prior knowledge on the topic, or interest. As a result, we implemented a check system and those issues that received checks would be discussed in our policy brief. Though topics to be addressed were soon chosen, for many policies, we found ourselves having to add more on due to the topic needing to be solved in different directions to provide the best possible policies to be implemented.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of how we came together as a team to share our knowledge and ideas to create a policy brief. Although we live in different time zones, we discussed when we would be awake so we could schedule calls to work around that. As well as assigning roles on what team members should do, so everything was organized.
What we learned
Through sharing our ideas, we learned about different takes on the issues plaguing India during COVID- 19. As a result, we further connected such issues to past events such as globalization contributing to the stigma around women and trans people's health, in fear of breaking old customs and traditions. As well as how COVID- 19 has affected daily wage workers, putting humanities and a standpoint. While we also learned about the medical side, with the need to better facilitate health forms and mandate PhD's to provide more resources for those in the field.
What's next for United in developing healthcare solutions for India
What's next for United in developing healthcare solutions for India is addressing prior, underlying issues that have only further gotten worse due to COVID- 19. Finding solutions to such problems will prevent India from reaching such a state when another major event hits. These policies we developed are an absolute necessity for any state in 2021, education is and always will be the root of the problem and of the solution, that is why we need to make it better and more inclusive and that's our ultimate goal in the future. But education doesn't come alone, while a new generation gets educated, the problem that are already happening need to be solved and we hope our policies will help in that matter.
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