Briefing No. 17 - India Special
"Travelling to India as part of the Greenwood Place community has led me to think about my philanthropy in a new, and more holistic, way. Thank you."
Greenwood Place Community Member
This month, a group of 16 Greenwood Place community members came together in India to explore this question: what does it take to make lasting, positive change.
Over 5 days we visited local leaders from all walks of life with our partners at Leaders’ Quest. We spent time in smart restaurants, in one-room homes, in slums, villages and forests. We met activists, teachers, entrepreneurs and elders.
We put together this special edition briefing to share a little of what we learned.
CHOICES AND CHANCES
Priyanka (name changed) is 18 and a whip smart, state-level athlete from the beautiful, rural state of Haryana.
Priyanka's parents promised that she would be allowed to continue her studies if she got married, but her new family beat her and kept her home. When she ran out of every option she could think of, Priyanka caught the train to Mumbai.
Deepali Vandana and the Urja team picked Priyanka up at the main train station. They are providing her with temporary housing, counselling and support back into education.
A TrustLaw poll ranked India as the fourth most dangerous country in the world for women and UNICEF estimates that almost 20% of Indian women aged 20–24 are married by age 15 - but Urja’s work and their outspoken advocacy on behalf of women and girls have changed both police attitudes and individual family decisions - and their work deeply affects the lives of individual girls.
CLEAN WATER & CARBON CREDITS
Spring Health is a social business that cleans and provides water to the very poor, The CEO, Kishan Nanavati is thoughtful and determined. He serves 28,000 households with clean water - selling carbon credits as well as water to create a financially sustainable model than keeps prices as low as possible.
Spring Health's network of local entrepreneurs increase their income by over 50%, and water-related sickness reduces amongst its customers by an estimated 29%.
We loved Spring Health’s marketing method - performing e-coli tests on drinking water door to door and showing families the bacteria in the water that their children are drinking…
TRANSFORMING EDUCATION OUTCOMES
“We play all our cards to get our programme started with teachers. And then the teachers see the change in their students and that does the rest.”
Pankaj Sharma from Transform Schools is committed to turning around India's secondary education system, at speed and at scale.
India is projected to have the largest workforce in the world by 2027 - a huge demographic opportunity. Great strides have been made over the past decade to get millions of children into primary school. However, just 7 out of 10 students in grade 8 are able to read at a grade 2 level.
Transform’s combination of intense remedial education, plus deep school and community engagement is changing this for 2.4 million students already - with 70% of costs covered by government. Their remedial programme sees students advancing 1.7 - 2.5 academic years. We were blown away.
RETHINKING HEALTHCARE
“What really struck us … was the disengagement of family members even though they cared most about the patients. We saw that you could turn areas of pain, anxiety and suffering into areas of learning. You could bring the family into the centre of care. …It was an absolute ‘no-brainer’”
Syed Alam, Co-Founder, Noora Health
India has about 4 million skilled healthcare professionals to serve a population of 1.36 billion – that’s about 29 per 10,000 people. Patients and their families often wait for hours, if not days, in public hospitals which are overcrowded and understaffed.
Noora Health trains family members as caregivers who can provide effective health care support to the people they care for. This simple innovation has seen a 71% decrease in 30 day post surgical complications, a 23% decrease in hospital preventable re-admissions and a 42% decrease in newborn readmissions.
CONSERVATION & DIGNITY
“When you talk about commons, you have to talk about equality. This is about ordinary people doing extraordinary things… villagers who are by their very nature systems thinkers and long term planners. We see village people becoming heroes every day" Jagdeesh Rao, CEO and Founder of FES
FES enables the rural poor to secure legal rights to access, improve and manage their common lands, combining resource management and conservation with improving livelihoods. They are working with more than 20,000 villages, protecting 6.24 million acres of ‘commons’ and benefiting 10.7 million rural people.
The extraordinary numbers however, don’t give you a sense of the dignity that FES’s radical partnership approach provides to the individual villagers who they work with and the strength of their work to protect and restore land. Our day in the forest with FES will stay with all of us for a very long time.
We saw the power of strong communities throughout our week together.
And we learned over and over again that there is nothing inevitable about injustice and inequality.
EVENTS AT GREENWOOD PLACE
Greenwood Place will be at the Skoll World Forum from 31 March - 2 April. We’ll be talking international philanthropy and cultural complexity over breakfast with Jagdeesh Rao, Safeena Husain and Deval Sanghavi. And our partner Transform Schools will also be launching results of their RCT with J-Pal. You can book tickets for the J-Pal/Transform event here. We hope to see you there!
We’re building our programme for teach-ins and roundtable discussions in 2020. Let us know what you’d like to learn about. And, in the mean time, please put 3rd June in your diary for breakfast with James Thornton, Founder of Client Earth.