To re-emphasise the importance of wearing masks in the fight against COVID-19, the India Protectors Alliance (IPA), is bringing together Samhita Social Ventures, RBL Bank, Crompton Greaves, IKEA India, Pernod Ricard India Foundation, Kimberly-Clark Professional and other companies and foundations, to initiate India’s first cross-brand mask engagement – #PehnoSahi.
Tag: Health
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Treat sanitation as public good: UN at launch of hygiene fund
The COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on poor hygiene and sanitation practices like never before. With good hygiene practices having taken centre stage in public discussions in 2020, the United Nations has grown louder in its calls for treating sanitation as a “public good”.
In line with this agenda, late last year the UN created the Sanitation & Hygiene Fund to provide accelerated funding to countries with the heaviest burden and the lowest ability.
Click below to read more about what global governance is doing to prioritise sanitation as a governance agenda.
Clicking on this link will take you to an external site
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With longer shifts, fewer workers can run factory operations; infection risks will be lower: HUL
FMCG major Hindustan Unilever CMD Sanjiv Mehta on Monday supported states for increasing shift times in factories to 12 hours a day, saying the move will help in restricting the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
He also added that aspects like social security and sufficient rest to the factory workers are essential.
Taking cue from Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, a slew of states have announced temporary changes in factory laws to allow for longer shift times with mandatory higher wages, but the same have come under some criticism from workers” unions.
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The key to COVID-19 prevention in slums
Slums across India have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 crisis. 42% of Mumbai’s population lives in slums and therefore they require carefully planned measures to ensure that preventative and primary care remain accessible.
The Bridgespan Group and WHO emphasise that community participation is the key to implement any COVID-19 preventive interventions in the slums.
This is as a model of care, designed while incorporating community participation is more likely to be accepted and effective in the long-term. To elaborate on the practicality of their recommendation, they describe activities where communities have been engaged and relay how this principle helped the programs in Mumbai slums.
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Are healthcare facilities accessible to India’s tribals?
“India no longer has the luxury of continuing to wait and watch as millions of its tribal peoples suffer and die from preventable causes.”
There is a much higher incidence of maternal and under-five mortality, stuntedness, tuberculosis, and cardiovascular diseases among India’s 104 million tribals compared with the larger population.
Piramal Swasthya and The Bridgespan Group map out the reasons for the lack of reduction of health challenges in tribal areas based on their field studies.
They outline factors such as barriers in access to healthcare and information, insufficient number of public health facilities, and lack of data.
They stress that for scalable and population-wide impact to be achieved, especially to meet India’s national aspirations of Sustainable Development goals of health and well being- a focused and collaborative approach between all stakeholders of society is the only way forward.
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Strengthening the public health system is in our enlightened self interest
Public health and economic experts stress the importance of organising and fortifying the private healthcare system’s response to the COVID-19 crisis, given the large proportion of the population it caters to in our ‘Leaders with Purpose’ webinar series,
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Kimberly Clark | Making lives better through purpose driven brands
The global effort to achieve sanitation and water for all by 2030 is extending beyond the household to include institutional settings such as separate washrooms in schools and workspaces.
About 94% of women are employed in the informal sectors, according to the National Women’s Commission. Such informal sectors lack basic sanitation facilities including toilets. Public toilets, even if available, are often unsanitary and poorly maintained. Without access to toilets, women and girls develop coping strategies like drinking less water that in turn increases the risk for women’s health problems and their well-being, especially in times of menstruation. The extent of the problem is large in the school ecosystem across India
With the mission to create better workplaces that are healthier, safer and more productive, KCP in partnership with Samhita, designed two projects-
- Provide improved sanitation infrastructure in rural schools in Maharashtra and nudge children to adopt better sanitation habits
- Provide increased access to better sanitation facilities for women working in informal markets
How did we impact 2000+ women and children’s lives
Project 1- The project aimed at solving two key challenges-
- Poor usage of toilets by children in schools, and
- Absence of hand washing facilities at critical junctures
We collaborated with the Swachh Maharashtra Grand Challenge, a first-of-its-kind open innovation platform, in partnership with the government, corporate & social sector to address the key challenges in the sanitation ecosystem; by identifying and piloting innovative programme models across sanitation value chain. We identified 4 major components under this setup-
How to address the school sanitation ecosystem
Project 1 – The project aimed at solving two key challenges –
- Poor usage of toilets by children in schools, and
- Absence of hand washing facilities at critical junctures
We received 50+ innovative solutions from across the country. A thorough review of the applications led us to select the most innovative and sustainable programs that would help build an impactful ecosystem in school sanitation. KCP and Samhita together set the journey from selection to knowledge dissemination for the selected programs:
- Providing grants to selected pilot programmes
- Coaching & mentoring
- Project monitoring & evaluation, and
- Knowledge dissemination.
The project impacted 2000+ children of Chandrapur, Maharashtra.
How to help women access sanitation in informal markets
The second project aimed at addressing the need for safe sanitation facilities for women working in informal markets. We shortlisted GARV TOILETS and CORO as implementation partners. The project provides sanitation facilities with following features:
To provide holistic, effective and sustainable sanitation impact, four components were designed:
- Localised Behaviour Change Communication
- Menstrual Hygiene Management
- Operations & Maintenance
- Waste Management
To support the end-to-end implementation of the project, Samhita leveraged their in-house expertise through the following stages- providing operational plans, developing standard operating procedures, monitoring and evaluation progress and outcomes and providing capacity building support for the implementation partners.
The project impacted 2000+ women in Kurla, Mumbai, Maharashtra.
Geographies
Project 1: Chandrapur Maharashtra
Project 2: Kurla, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Impact Numbers
4000+ Lives Touched
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WASH Platform | Wash Grand Challenge (2019)
The WASH Platform builds synergistic collaboration between multiple stakeholders from the Private Sector, Development Sector and the Government, to identify, implement and replicate high impact projects across the sanitation value chain, starting from the state of Maharashtra.
The platform is a joint initiative between Samhita Social Ventures and India Sanitation Coalition in partnership with The Government of Maharashtra, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with UNICEF and CEPT University as knowledge partners.
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VIACOM18 | How to impact through the media lens
In a time where majority stakeholders were concentrating on building infrastructure to achieve the mission of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, Viacom18 utilized the weapon they knew best – storytelling to create lasting impact in a society that has long been captured by the screen.
The Viacom18 story
With the launch of Swachh Bharat Mission, availability and access to toilets had improved tremendously. But social and behavioural change communication were far from implementation questioning the long-term adoption of infrastructure usage. Lack of sanitation has many rippling effects.
The economic deprivation increases manifold when healthcare expenses and the cost of lost potential due to sickness arising from inadequate sanitation is added.
With the belief that sustained change in behaviour is at the helm of creating long term impact, Viacom18 worked with Samhita to design an intervention that aimed to address the issue of Open Defecation in Mumbai’s slums and inadequate sanitation in schools.
How did we impact 8,000+ lives
Samhita designed and implemented a community sanitation program with a focus on strong behaviour change in addition to providing basic infrastructure. Our theory of change centered around changing behavior, beliefs, and myths around toilets as a key to ensuring sustained open defecation free status in all communities and schools. The idea was to design visual messaging at key locations in slum areas, followed with awareness campaigns that brought together a social message with Viacom’s unique panache for storytelling.
Our vision of multiplying the impact by evolving the approach from infrastructure to behavioral change was distributed in 3 stages.
Geography
Impact
