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2019-04-30
Sattva;
From September 2018 to April 2019, Sattva undertook a first-of-its-kind study on the everyday giving ecosystem in India, with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies. The study does a comprehensive mapping of the giving ecosystem, including the givers, the NGOs that engage with retail givers, online and offline giving channels, and the enabling ecosystem, their practices, successes and barriers, and provides actionable recommendations into unlocking more potential from India's everyday giver.
2019-04-01
FSG;
Around the globe, a wave of financial innovation that seeks to create social and environmental benefits while producing attractive returns is shaping the field of sustainable finance.
From investments in publicly listed corporations based on environmental, social, and governance factors, to bonds issued to fund climate and environmental improvements; from micro-credit to small retailers through innovative credit assessments, to parametric insurance products improving the disaster resilience of countries, the world of sustainable finance is growing and becoming increasingly diverse.
In this report, we take a closer look at these innovations and more, highlighting how they are working to mobilize private-sector capital at scale to address social and environmental challenges. We also explore recent developments and potential opportunities in Asia's four largest economies: China, India, Japan, and Indonesia.
2019-02-01
Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.;
For more than 20 years, we have supported work to improve population and reproductive health in India. After making significant progress in this field, particularly in the areas of maternal health and rights, we are preparing to exit the population and reproductive health field in India and are supporting a concluding round of grantmaking focused on maternal health quality of care.
Through this four-year strategy, we aim to advance maternal health by supporting a shift in the field's focus from access to quality of maternal health care. To accomplish this goal, the strategy backs three main areas of work or sub strategies: strengthening the supply of quality maternal health services, building the demand for quality services through accountability mechanisms, and building an evidence base and support for maternal health quality of care. The strategy officially launched in June 2015. Our evaluation partner, Mathematica Policy Research, documented early progress of the strategy through March 2017. Building on earlier evaluations of the strategy, this document provides findings from the midline evaluation covering April 2017 to March 2018.
2019-01-30
WINGS;
Strategic use of ever unpredictable financial resources. Lean yet nimble teams, structured to facilitate overall achievement of goals. Collaborations that prioritise knowledge, learning, and making interventions. An encouraging sector environment. Trust, transparency and communication among all stakeholders. These are necessary elements in commonly-held visions of effective social impact and philanthropy sectors, that utilise their shrinking resources well, proactively engage with their social, political and economic world and constantly innovate.
The reality of India's social impact and philanthropy sectors, however, could not be further removed from this vision. Stuck in the pressures of sheer survival, saddled with a complex regulatory landscape and a challenging socio-political context, our vision for the social impact and philanthropy sectors has become a receding horizon, instead of a guiding compass.
2018-12-01
"La Caixa" Banking Foundation;
Since 1997, the "La Caixa" Foundation has been promoting international cooperation programs in order to provide opportunities and improve the living conditions of vulnerable populations in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Over this period of 20 years, working in partnership with different cooperation actors has brought us to a process of continuous learning and formulation of new tools and methods that enable us to improve our interventions.
For this reason, in 2016 we decided to launch the Work4Progress program. It responds to the need to rethink the way in which our organization promotes international cooperation projects, to experiment with new tools to strengthen their impact and to incorporate a new focus on social innovation.
The Work4Progress program thus supports the creation of "Open Innovation Platforms for the creation of employment in Peru, India and Mozambique" by means of collaborative partnerships between local civil society organizations, the private sector, administration, universities and Spanish NGOs.
The main innovation of this program is the incorporation of new tools and methodologies in: (1) listening and identification of community needs, (2) co-creation and prototyping of new solutions, (3) exploration of instruments for scaling, (4) governance, (5) evolving evaluation systems and (6) financing strategies. The goal of all of this is to try to incorporate innovation strategies in all its components in an integral manner.
Work4Progress has been designed with a Think and Do Tank mentality. The member organizations of the platforms are experimenting in the field, while a group of international experts helps us to obtain this knowledge and share it with centers of thought and action at an international level. In fact, this is the objective of this publication: to share the theoretical framework of the program, to connect these ideas with concrete examples and to continue to strengthen the meeting point between social innovation and development cooperation.
Work4Progress is offered as a "living lab" to test new methodologies that may be useful for other philanthropic institutions, government or entities specializing in international development.
In this publication, the manner in which its action is structured is defined as a "second operating system". The aim is not to modify the systems, procedures or devices that the international cooperation entities currently have in place, but rather to launch a complementary space that allows for the testing of new tools and procedures, which sometimes cannot be developed due to a lack of time, knowledge or financing.
W4P enables us, as an entity, to depart from the traditional framework of project financers in order to act as a facilitator or driver of innovation platforms together with other public and private partners. The Sustainable Development Goals require us to work on platforms in this manner. We need to take advantage of this opportunity.
2018-11-06
Rockefeller Archive Center;
The early twentieth century saw a shift in the perspectives and policies related to medical care in India. In place of hospital care, preventive public health initiatives became more and more important. In this context, health education for individuals including enhancing consciousness for sanitation and hygiene, and protecting maternal and child health received greater attention than before. In the changing international scenario of the early twentieth century, improvements in maternal and infant health became matters of world-wide interest. Increasing imperial rivalries and anxieties about the future health condition of the children of army men, to some extent, prompted certain measures aimed at improving the health of mothers and children through adoption of public health measures. Child welfare movements developed in different parts of the world. In India, health policies of both colonial administrative personnel and administrators in native princely states, efforts of voluntary non-governmental agencies, as well as activities of international philanthropic organisations all played crucial roles in developing these new kinds of public health sensibilities and initiatives. The views expressed by the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) and the role it played in this respect remain significant.
2018-10-18
Safe Water Network;
Since publishing our first India Sector Review, Community Safe Water Solutions, in 2014, a report that assessed the service delivery gap in safe water supply and documented the potential for Small Water Enterprises (SWEs) to provide sustainable safe water supply in quality affected habitations in rural India, we have seen Small Water Enterprises (SWEs) gain traction in the country.Increasingly, SWEs have been recognized for the value and benefits they provide as a cost-effective, safe, affordable solution complementary to piped water supply, to address India's drinking water crisis and contribute to achieving Sustainability Development Goal (SDG) 6.1, universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all.SWEs are relevant not just to rural, but also to urban India, particularly where increasing urbanization and migration is creating drinking water stress in India's major cities. The situation in urban India, and the role that Small Water Enterprises can play, is detailed in the Urban Sector Review, Drinking Water Supply for Urban Poor: Role of Urban Small Water Enterprises, published in 2016. Drawing from an assessment of the drinking water scenario in four major cities of India, the report reviews the evolving urban landscape and its emerging demands for safe drinking water. Itprofiles potential funding sources and presents the opportunities and challenges that SWE implementers face as they seek to sustain and scale their operations. Lastly, it provides a series of recommendations to move the sector forward.Building on these recommendations, the Policy and Enabling Environment for Small Water Enterprises report, published in 2017, highlighted critical factors that need to be addressed and specific steps to create a more conducive enabling environment for the rapid growth of SWEs in urban India.Advancing these ideas further, and summarizing the seven reports from the 3 year initiative, Small Water Enterprises for Resilient Cities published in 2018 describes how SWEs can provide safe water security affordably to water stressed cities that are coping with dense populations due to increased migration and urbanization.This 2018 Sector Review, Small Water Enterprises to Mitigate the Drinking Water Challenge, ties together the body of work to understand drinking water supply in rural and urban India, and the gap that can be filled by SWEs amid growing water stress and water-quality contamination. It is informed additionally by on ground experience and learnings from our field initiatives in rural and urban India where we have demonstrated the viability of SWEs.The report includes discussions from expert interviews with SWE practitioners such as Fontus Water, Naandi, Sarvajal, WaterHealth India and Waterlife. It calls for further policy and institutional reforms to promote public private partnerships with fair risk management in tenders, and a conducive ecosystem to accelerate expansion of SWEs. Additionally, this report calls for an investment by the Government into Small Water Enterprises to cover capitalcosts and an operating subsidy to enable low pricing in rural areas for providing safe water access to India's population.This report is intended for stakeholders in the water sector including central and state government, state level water supply departments, local water authorities, financing institutions, SWE implementers, NGOs and funding partners who are committed to delivering safe drinking water.
2018-10-11
Rockefeller Archive Center;
When the Ford Foundation entered India in 1951, its focus was overwhelmingly rural. As its presence expanded over time, it branched out to other areas such as education and culture, small-scale industrial development, manpower and management, population control and family planning, and technical training. Historians of development and U.S. foreign relations have over the past decade explored various facets of the foundation's activities in India. However, thus far, its role in the urban sphere in India and perhaps even globally has not received much scholarly attention. I began my research at the Rockefeller Archive Center in September 2017, with the intention of studying a very specific urban project in India: the Ford Foundation's planning assistance to Calcutta (now Kolkata) from 1961 to 1974, then India's largest and industrially most important city. Given the lack of secondary references on this topic, I came in with some basic questions. 1) Why did the Ford Foundation get involved in Calcutta's urban renewal project? 2) What was the nature of the Foundation's involvement? More specifically, was it a grant for training or simply a planning program? At that stage in my dissertation research, I had hoped to have a chapter on the Ford Foundation and use it as a contrast to study the response of locally-based Indian and British businesses to Calcutta's civic and infrastructural problems, which had started to make international headlines by the late 1950s. In fact, my main focus was on Calcutta's businesses. However, as I will chart out in this report, the archival materials at the RAC persuaded me to reorient and broaden my core research questions and framework.
2018-10-08
PLOS ONE;
Globally, preterm birth (PTB) and low infant birth weight (LBW) are leading causes of maternal and child morbidity and mortality. Inadequate water and sanitation access (WASH) are risk factors for PTB and LBW in low-income countries. Physical stress from carrying water and psychosocial stress from addressing sanitation needs in the open may be mechanisms underlying these associations. If so, then living in a community with strong social capital should be able to buffer the adverse effects of WASH on birth outcomes. The objective of this study is to assess the relationships between WASH access and social conditions (including harassment and social capital) on PTB and LBW outcomes among Indian women, and to test whether social conditions modified the association between WASH and birth outcomes
2018-08-01
Safe Water Network;
Safe Water Network India (SWNI) has written this report in collaboration with its knowledge partner The NationalInstitute of Urban Affairs (NIUA), both partners of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) WASH Alliance. This report summarizes the key outputs from a three-year partnership between Safe Water Network India (SWNI) and USAID during the period 2014-2017. The outputs included seven reports ("Drinking Water Supply for Urban Poor: Role of Urban Small Water Enterprises," October 2016; four city reports: Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Visakhapatnam, 2016; "Policy and Enabling Environment," September 2017; and "Performance Standards" ), as well as the development of Digital Tools.This report, developed after the conclusion of the grant project period, seeks to advance the findings of the above body of work to respond to the urgent and increasing need to provide safe drinking water to India's water-stressed cities. It recommends including small water enterprises (SWEs) in city planning for the creation of resilient cities. It also highlights the benefits and potential of expanding the SWE category in the urban environment, and recommends enhanced collaboration and partnerships between the government and the private sector to achieve this objective.Beginning by introducing the urban slum landscape and the existing water supply scenario for its inhabitants, the report goes on to describe how urban small water enterprises (USWEs) can provide a viable and sustainable complementary solution to the government's piped-water efforts to meet the needs of the urban poor and support the transformation of safe-water-stressed cities into resilient cities. It further outlines the requirements to enable USWEs to meet the needs of the urban poor by creating a more conducive environment and a regulatory framework for the advancement of USWEs.
2018-07-25
C&A Foundation;
The presence of child labour in informal apparel supply chains is significant1 . A study commissioned by GoodWeave and C&A Foundation in 2015 states that, "…embroidery activities take place in the peri-urban and rural areas of both the NCR and Bareilly (Uttar Pradesh) clusters. Located outside the code of conduct, that is enforceable by regulations, homework remains mired in enduring challenges, like lower wages, harsh working conditions, health and safety risks and child labour". In 2016, GoodWeave (with funding from C&A Foundation) launched a pilot project to transfer GoodWeave's model for ending forced and child labour from the handmade carpet sector to the apparel and jewelry sector.
The short-term goal of this two-year pilot was to build capacity to reduce child labour and forced labour in informal apparel supply chains in India. It had four key objectives: to leverage market influence over suppliers; to improve supply chain transparency; to offer educational opportunities for children in garment worker communities and to ensure decent work for adults. The four objectives of the pilot are aligned with both GoodWeave's Theory of Change (ToC) for the apparel sector, and C&A Foundation's ToC for its Forced and Child Labour Programme. This evaluation is based on, and tests, GoodWeave's ToC for the pilot initiative implemented in the apparel sector.
2018-05-30
FSG;
An innovative new model pioneered by affordable housing finance companies (AHFCs) has made home ownership attainable for millions of low-income informal sector customers in urban India. There are now 26 such AHFCs with a combined loan portfolio of $4.1+ billion in India, who have financed over 230,000 houses over the last decade. Due to the availability of equity and debt, and potential for geographic expansion, this market is likely to continue to grow rapidly. This report examines the current state of the market and provides recommendations for facilitating greater scale so that even more households can own or improve their homes.
