Reaching out to 10 million in remote villages
PRADAN, a non-profit organization that has been working to remove poverty and inequality in the most remote villages, announced the new goal of helping positively impact the lives of 10 million people in remote areas improve their own circumstances by working with them to build self-help groups.
This is likely to be realized by creating more collaborations across NGOs, Govt and other stakeholders, besides self- empowering communities to mobilize groups on their own and spread the benefits of such collectivism.
PRADAN was set up in 1983 by Deep Joshi and Vijay Mahajan with the intent of young educated people with access, abilities and security going out in the spirit of extending oneself and working with the community to transform lives through self-empowerment. Over the years, they have looked to increasingly collaborate with CSOs, and engage with other stakeholders like government, philanthropies, donors, corporates, academia and media to address the issues of equality and injustice, in a holistic manner.
Some specific successes of PRADAN’s collaborative approach include:
- Working directly with more than 589,000 families across seven of India’s poorest states today.
- PRADAN initiated sectoral Institutions like Tasar (Silk) Development Foundation (TDF) and National Small holder Poultry Development Trust (NSPDT) works with more than 20,000 farmers.
- Supporting 70 NGOs across India that focus on the rural poor. This includes consortiums like Vikas Bazar.net in Jharkhand, SRI Manch in Chhattisgarh and a group of six NGOs under project Ushar Mukti in West Bengal.
- Building programs in partnership with the government, such as the National Rural Livelihood Mission that reaches 350M people.
- Working with Universities to train the next generation of social-sector professionals and researchers.
PRADAN is determined to up-scale its work and reach millions more and by 2022, it plans to reach 10 million people across 12,500 villages in the seven states where it has its operation.
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