In Ballia Bujurg village, Nawada district, a young woman was watching Auxiliary Nurse Midwives monitor pregnant women at a Village Health Sanitation and Nutrition Day. What began as routine attendance sparked something larger.
Sapna Kumari, then a Youth Champion with Population Foundation of India‘s Kishori Samooh initiative, walked away from that session with a new ambition: she wanted to become an ANM (Auxiliary Nurse Midwife) herself. Population Foundation of India (PFI) is a non-governmental organisation that runs the Kishori Samooh initiative, a community-based platform that empowers adolescent girls through knowledge, peer engagement, and leadership around menstrual health and sexual and reproductive health rights.
She began preparing for the entrance examination, and in 2022, she qualified for admission to the Patel Nursing Training Centre in Patna. To fund her studies, she started coaching children in her village.
Sapna’s story is one of two that sit at the heart of how adolescent girls in rural Bihar, working through PFI’s Kishori Samooh platform, are reshaping conversations around menstrual health, sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR), and adolescent wellbeing in communities where these topics have long remained restricted.
What Is Kishori Samooh
Population Foundation of India’s Kishori Samooh initiative is a community-based platform designed to give adolescent girls access to knowledge, peer support, and leadership opportunities around menstrual health and SRHR.
Through the initiative, girls are trained as Youth Champions, equipped to mentor peers, lead awareness sessions, and advocate for better health infrastructure in their communities.
The two Youth Champions whose journeys stand out from Bihar are Sapna Kumari from Nawada and Kehkisha Parveen, who leads an adolescent group of 17 girls in her neighbourhood.
Sapna Kumari: A Sanitary Pad Bank and a Nursing Dream
Sapna Kumari, 26, grew up in a large family with limited financial resources. Like many young women in her village, she faced pressure to marry early and leave education behind. In 2021, she joined the Kishori Samooh initiative and became a Youth Champion, going on to mentor 20 girls and creating a space where they could talk openly about sexual and reproductive health.
One of her most concrete contributions was setting up a sanitary pad bank for Kishori Club members. Girls contributed Re. 1 per day, pooling resources to purchase pads in bulk at lower costs through identifying local retail shops. The initiative covered contributing members and extended to women and girls in the community who could not contribute financially. To ensure the pad bank continued after her, Sapna trained two adolescent girls to manage it.
In conversation with The Logical Indian, her mother reflected on what this journey meant for her family: “Sapna has shown immense courage. She stepped out, gained confidence, and is now able to pursue her dream of becoming an ANM. This is very rare in our society where daughters are often married off instead of being supported in their education.”
Sapna’s goal is to return to her village as a qualified ANM and improve healthcare access for women and girls.
Kehkisha Parveen: Resistance, a Pandemic, and a Library
Kehkisha Parveen joined the adolescent group in 2017, when she attended a PFI-organised session on sexual and reproductive health issues among young people. The session revealed how little information was available within her community. Girls were regularly pushed into early marriages, and knowledge gaps around health and rights were significant. Kehkisha decided to form an adolescent group in her neighbourhood to address this directly. She became a youth champion, taking on a leadership role and leading adolescent groups from 2021.
She became a Youth Champion, received training on Adolescent Reproductive Sexual Health components, and began leading the Kishori Samooh group of 17 girls. The community’s response was not immediately welcoming. Many residents approached her family with warnings that her work would negatively influence the girls’ behaviour. The resistance was extensive.
The COVID-19 pandemic shifted things. While speaking to The Logical Indian, the circumstances around Kehkisha’s work during the lockdown period illustrate a broader point: during a period of widespread disruption, she ensured continued access to sanitary pads through her pad bank and also raised awareness about COVID vaccination in the community.
Beyond health, Kehkisha focused on education access. She worked to establish a block-level library to support young people preparing for competitive examinations such as the UPSC and BPSC. The initiative received support from the District Magistrate and the Block Development Officer, who provided books. Today, the library stands as a resource for aspirants in her area, and Kehkisha is regarded as a role model by girls and families across her community.
Peer Education as Community Infrastructure
What connects the work of Sapna and Kehkisha is that both began not as trained professionals, but as young women who attended a session, recognised a gap, and built something in response. The pad banks they created were not top-down interventions. They were designed, funded, and run by adolescent girls within their own communities. The library Kehkisha advocated for was not a government scheme delivered from outside. It was a community demand met through persistent local advocacy.
This is what the Kishori Samooh model attempts to institutionalise: girls as the architects of their own health and educational environments, not just beneficiaries of programmes designed for them.
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
The journeys of Sapna Kumari and Kehkisha Parveen point to something that health programmes often overlook: that access to information and a peer community can shift trajectories in ways that individual interventions rarely do.
When a 26-year-old from a village in Nawada qualifies for nursing training and a 23-year-old in Bihar gets a block-level library built, it raises a question worth sitting with. How many girls in similar circumstances are waiting for the equivalent of a single session that changes the direction of their lives? And are enough such spaces being created?
