Suchergebnisse

India suffers from a high maternal and infant mortality rate, especially in rural areas, where poor women do not receive effective care and one in every 22 infants die within one year of life. In 2010, Dimagi, in partnership with Catholic Relief Services (CRS), IntraHealth International, Real Medicine Foundation, and Save the Children, deployed CommCare mobile technology to help Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) improve their care for pregnant women and their newborns at the last mile in rural India. CommCare uses audio, video, imagery, short message service (SMS) texting, data and tracking forms, multiple languages, and other features to standardize ASHAs' service delivery, improve counseling techniques and patient coordination, and collect real-time data for performance monitoring. The multimedia aids enhance client engagement and assist low-literate ASHAs and their clients. Through a partnership with the Government of India and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a CommCare-based application is being scaled across eight Indian states to strengthen the monitoring of the service delivery of anganwadi center's in the country. The CommCare mobile application is intended to replace the extensive paper registers anganwadi workers are required to maintain. The app is designed to improve the care anganwadi workers provide their communities, tracking distribution of immunizations and supplementary food, attendance of children at preschool, and the nutrition status of children up to age five.

Many of India's disadvantaged youth are apathetic about their education from the formal schooling system, resulting in high dropout rates. Lack of interest and perceived value of education often cause low retention and dismal learning outcomes, which can perpetuate poverty and contribute to the socio-economic divide. In India, however, creative learning is a privilege of the rich few. To remedy this situation, Agastya operates a hands-on science education program, equipping disadvantaged students of government schools in rural areas with tools and learning that foster confidence, creativity, teamwork, and leadership. Agastya's learning methods take the form of activity - project and demo-based learning, peer-to-peer learning, and learning from nature. Agastya uses a variety of delivery channels: science center's serve as a hub for activities in a region, teacher trainings, science fairs, and summer camps; mobile science labs and lab-in-a-box programs deliver education to students' doorsteps and classrooms; government schoolteachers receive training in creative learning methods; and selected students obtain additional education on scientific concepts to become peer instructors.

Tuberculosis (TB) afflicts 2.8 million citizens in India, representing more than 30 percent of the world's total burden. To control TB, complete adherence to treatment is crucial—under the World Health Organization's (WHO) Directly Observed Therapy Short-course (DOTS) strategy. In this strategy, patients are required to take up to 75 doses under supervision over six months at a treatment center or in the presence of an observer. However, the scarcity or inaccessibility of treatment centers and truthful observers in hard to-reach areas often results in high default rates. Missing a dose or interrupting treatment is extremely dangerous, since those who default can relapse, or much worse, develop the deadlier, drug-resistant strain of TB. A continuing social stigma for those who have TB is also linked to incomplete treatment and lack of follow-up. There is poor data collection as well. Since 2006, Operation ASHA (OpASHA) has helped deliver the Last-mile connection to TB treatment and prevention in India by leveraging existing government infrastructure to supplement the country's own efforts. OpASHA receives free medicines, diagnostic facilities and physician services from the national TB control program. Through a partnership with Microsoft Research, OpASHA has pioneered a biometric technology called eCompliance for treatment. OpASHA serves 10 million people in nine states across India, in addition to 2.2 million people in Cambodia. OpASHA has expanded to Cambodia, and its model has already been replicated in Uganda, Kenya, and the Dominican Republic.

In India, women and girls, especially in rural areas, are particularly affected by illiteracy. The social enterprise educate girls works to reform the existing school framework and create community ownership of government schools to improve Indian girls' enrollment, retention, and academic performance. As of fiscal year 2017-18, educate girls operates in 10 districts in Rajasthan and 3 districts in Madhya Pradesh benefiting approximately 3.8 million beneficiaries. Educate girls creates community ownership of government schools by leveraging existing public, private, and community resources to empower the local communities. The educate girls model allows for sending one girl to school at United States dollar (USD) 5 per year. Its monitoring and evaluation system measures enrollment, attendance, and quality of learning for these girls, even at a large scale. The program's impact is assessed through rigorous evaluation techniques, including quasi-experimental designs and randomized control trials. The educate girls model has the potential for far-reaching benefits - continuing to address gender inequality in education can bring about real transformation, such as improvements in health, income levels, and overall livelihoods in rural populations.

In India, healthcare financing largely relies on direct out-of-pocket spending, which causes immense health-related financial burdens for the poor. Despite recent efforts by the government and the private sector, only 15 percent of the population in India is covered by health insurance. The Micro Insurance Academy (MIA) extends health insurance at the last mile through a bottom-up approach to the design, implementation and management of community-based health insurance. MIA develops an understanding of each community and delivers customized tools and frameworks that build a community's capacity to self-manage micro insurance schemes. MIA bridges the gap between insurers and the bottom of the pyramid by providing advisory support and insurance education to establish insurance schemes. To date, MIA-supported micro insurance schemes cover more than 40,000 people in India and Nepal.

With 700 million people residing in rural India over a large and diverse topography, providing access to safe drinking water is a significant challenge. The government has tried, playing a key role in financing and implementing drinking water schemes. However, about 30 percent of urban and 90 percent of rural households still depend completely on untreated surface or groundwater. The health and economic burdens of poor drinking water are enormous. It is estimated that about 21 percent of communicable diseases in India are water-related. In response, Waterlife, a for-profit company based out of Hyderabad, has experimented with an innovative business model—building and operating stand-alone water purification plants in underserved areas of India that would otherwise have no access to safe drinking water. Waterlife partners with local governments to provide the location and money for construction of the plants. Customers pay a small fee to fill up their 20-liter water jars, and this fee is used to pay back the government expenditure and cover ongoing plant maintenance and operations. The Waterlife model builds strong community ownership due to a transparent operating system with responsive customer service; community awareness campaigns on the importance of safe drinking water; locations in convenient public settings; and the training of a local corps of villagers to manage plant operations and maintenance. Impact can be seen in a reduced incidence of waterborne diseases and related medical expenses and improved job opportunities and school attendance for local villages. The expectation is that if continued and expanded, the utilization of Waterlife plants will enhance long-term economic and health development outcomes for disadvantaged and disenfranchised populations in India.