What we do
The scale of poverty in rural India is vast. Thousands of NGOs work to make an impact on it – these range from the huge and bureaucratic, to the tiny and locally-focused. We position ourselves between these two – choosing a few strategic areas around India in which to concentrate our efforts and build our impact, working at ‘grass-roots’ level through chosen partners with carefully selected village communities. We apply our training and resources so that their effect can be sustained and multiplied to help support village livelihood on a significant scale.
Our projects reflect our past, the present and our future. As you can see from our recent projects, we combine a long experience of rural poverty through a rural training institute near Lucknow in northern India, with a recent track record which has seen us expand our horizons and our presence to reach village communities in several other parts of India. This has given us the platforms on which our current projects are based. But it is the future that counts, and Jeevika Trust, along with our partners are committed to organic growth as the path to our dream of touching many, many more lives over the coming 3 – 5 years.
By building on our existing community links, and extending our existing ‘portfolio’ of appropriate technologies, we generate project concepts for the future. These may entail simply expanding a current project like bee-keeping for women from one village cluster to the next, or replicating a pilot project like goat-rearing and the lessons learned to another area. Other projects may be diversified by introducing new elements such as reproductive and child health, gender awareness building, or ‘deepening democracy’ training. Our aim in all of these is to widen and deepen the effect of our initiatives to the point where the beneficiaries themselves take over control and we are no longer needed.
We seek to balance a genuinely ‘holistic’ approach to community needs with a specialised focus on primary areas of intervention such as income-generation and micro-finance, access to water and primary healthcare, empowering women to learn skills and participate in village decision-making. To find out more about our projects please take a look at one of the sections below.
Our projects For an introduction to how we work with our Indian partners to build and manage village livelihood projects, click here.
Current projects To find out more about our current projects and who is benefiting from them please click here.
Recent projects For an overview of our more recent projects that are now completed, please click here.
