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Tag: REVIVE

Sanitation Workers

There are more than five million full-time sanitation workers of which two million are directly engaged in high-risk tasks such as emptying septic tanks, maintaining sewer lines, and drains at the cost of their health, dignity, and safety. Irrespective of their contributions, they are not recognized as essential public service providers, instead are overlooked, made invisible, stigmatized, and ostracized by society at large. Moreover, the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerability of sanitation workers and their families to many challenges. They face various challenges at the workplace, such as compromised health and safety, limited or no awareness about social security schemes, and limited skills and livelihood options. 

Therefore, the REVIVE Alliance aims to uplift sanitation workers by improving their overall quality of life while addressing critical socio-economic challenges faced by sanitation workers through focused interventions that cater to their immediate, medium- and long-term needs. In doing so, the project not only impacted the workers but also their family members resulting in 4x overall impact.

The project has 3 components:

Pharmacists

There are approximately 8,00,000 pharmacies in India with a compounded  annual growth rate of 10.08% in the organized sector. As per a study conducted on pharmacies by Samhita Social Ventures and the Cipla Foundation  41% pharmacists provide medical guidance to customers and 57% viewed themselves as a

Kirana Store Owners

Around 13-17 million kirana stores form an integral part of the retail industry in India and local economy in various pockets of urban and rural India. The kirana stores were especially instrumental during COVID-19 induced lockdown ensuring that citizens had stocks of regular food & grain supplies. The hyperlocal consumption will only grow with the rising middle-income group in India. However, the kiranas continue to be shackled in traditional, inefficient operational practices, and are under threat due to thin margins, increased competition from larger chains and ecommerce. While Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the pace of digital payments, larger digital transformation in terms of inventory management, customer servicing etc. is still largely absent. There is low awareness among small kiranas on benefits of modernization and lack of knowledge & handholding support to realize the transformation.

The kirana sub-alliance aims to catalyse penetration of digitization to the small merchants by making their businesses more profitable, resilient and competitive. The alliance focuses on demonstrating to the market that with awareness, hand holding and incentives, these small stores in urban & rural India can and will power India

Farmers

Through the REVIVE Allaince, Brihati Foundation is supporting 2 batches of farmer cohorts in the state of Gujarat, by providing them with working capital through Returnable Grants as a financial instrument. The farmer cohort funded by Brihati is supported by Somnath Farmers Producer Company as an on-ground implementation partner. The grant was provided in the form of subsidized vouchers to avail agricultural inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides, seeds etc for their harvesting season.

The farmer cohort

Construction Workers

The infrastructure sector is one of the largest employers of informal labour in urban India, necessitating worker communities to relocate to cities. These workers, often with little to no access to social security, often struggle when confronted with socio-economic challenges. This resurfaced as a challenge when workers such as construction workers, painters, carpenters, masons, etc. were worst hit during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic due to sudden cessation of work, lack of job security and poor social protection. While the government of India responded with provisions of relief payments, reimbursements, DBTs, and other support, access and awareness still remained a major roadblock in bridging the gap between worker communities and the available relief. Moreover, considering the informal and migrant nature of the construction worker cohort, there are erratic support channels to guarantee and handhold each worker to gain access to basic identity documents and social protection schemes. 

Revive strives to facilitate the recovery of worker communities by providing integrated support in terms of social protection. By standardizing the application facilitation process across construction sites and labour colonies, construction workers have been supported with the creation of basic savings accounts, enabling life/accident/health insurance schemes, PAN cards, BOCW (Building and Other Construction Works) and e-Shram cards for the workers to secure their future. This alliance of investors, corporates and developers that are a part of the infrastructure industry, has a common goal of reviving livelihoods within the industry while also adopting better labour practices in the process. These social protection linkages serve as key entry points to workers, such that they are better placed to seek entitlements and are well-informed about his/her social protection eligibility, which further enables them to support their family and extended community. 

Our partnerships with UNDP, the UK government, along with the commendable support received from like-minded funders and implementing partners has allowed us to commit to providing social protection to 8,500+ workers and are on the path to onboarding new cohorts. Our implementation partner, Haqdarshak Empowerment Solutions Pvt. Ltd. has already facilitated linkages across Delhi-NCR and Maharashtra and continues to demonstrate the need for social protection for a cohort as mobile and migrant as construction workers. With active collaborations with HDFC Capital Pvt. Ltd, Info Edge, Sunteck Realty and Shapoorji Pallonji Investment Advisors, we have already facilitated applications for relevant government schemes and ensured end-to-end service delivery of benefits to workers. 

What has been the impact so far?

  • Supporting basic identity documentation: Having witnessed the aftermath of COVID-19 on migrant construction workers accessing entitlements, the need for basic identity documents as critical entry points to social safety nets was reiterated. Revive has been supporting workers with BOCW cards and renewals, e-Shram registrations, updated and linked Aadhaar cards, to name a few, such that they are recognized in the construction ecosystem and formally registered as beneficiaries of government schemes.

Blue-Collared Workers

Given the steep hit that the garment industry took due to COVID-19 and the impact it had on the livelihood of garment workers, Arvind Foundation has partnered with Samhita-CGF and impact partner Learnet to provide financial support, re-skilling and placements to ex-Arvind workers who were laid off during the pandemic. Arvind Foundation is the CSR arm of Arvind Ltd, a global player in the textile and apparel manufacturing industry and they became an integral member of the REVIVE alliance – aiming to create a better normal.

Program Structure 

Training:

  • Basic job readiness training

Placement:

  • Identification & mapping of jobs according to the skills and location preference of the selected candidate
  • Collection of placement proofs from employers and KYC documents from candidates 

Returnable Grant:

  • After preliminary KYC and placement verification conducted by Learnet and CGF, the list of candidates and their documents are shared with Supermoney for verification and onboarding
  • After candidates accept terms of the returnable grant through calls conducted by Supermoney, the batch is finalized by CGF 
  • The equivalent amount is transferred from CGF to Supermoney after a round of internal approvals
  • Upon receipt of the transferred amount, the grant worth INR 4,500 is disbursed to the candidates before they receive their first salary
  • After the deferment period of one month, Supermoney sends out repayment reminders and links to the candidates
  • The candidate repays the grant in five instalments of INR 900 each
  • Repayments are collected, reconciled and transferred back to CGF account by Supermoney

What did we learn?

Mobilization:

Learnet is a training and placement agency and they have limited connections with the local communities. There is a need for the intervention of a grassroots NGO or organization that can aid mobilization and ensure that the program serves the beneficiaries in need (people who lost jobs on account of the pandemic in this case). 

Learnet, CGF and SuperMoney struggled to reach out to these communities and conduct monitoring/impact assessment after their placements and receipt of RG. The involvement of an intermediary organisation can improve accountability when it comes to repayment and will further streamline the RG related processes. 

Curriculum Design:

Candidates are associated with Learnet for a short span of 4.5 hours and are mapped to a job almost immediately and have very limited connection with them. The curriculum is very basic and does not equip them with the required skill sets. Since the cohort was heterogeneous in terms of their socio-economic background, qualifications and technical skills, Learnet struggled to map the available openings to their skill sets and could not fully satisfy their requirements. There is a need to design a longer upskilling/reskilling program with a focused approach that aims to train candidates to take up job roles that are in demand (Refer reskilling note proposed to Arvind). 

It is also imperative to incorporate financial and digital literacy modules into the curriculum to ensure uptake of digital tools amongst communities. 

Capacity Building:

Training partners are new to hybrid programs including financial instruments like Returnable Grants. There is a need for capacity building of these training partners to improve communication and ensure a seamless flow of clean data. 

Returnable Grant:

These salaried blue-collar workers earn an average salary of INR 10,000

Beautypreneurs

The COVID pandemic resulted in the shutting down of a lot of businesses and beauty salons were one of them. The extended lockdowns resulted in low to absolutely nil customer footfall. 

The beauty and personal care market is expected to touch $10 billion by 2021, growing at an annual rate of 5-6%, according to a report by the Indian Beauty & Hygiene Association. However, the majority of beauty and wellness businesses, including salons, spas, and barbershops, fall either in the small and medium enterprise or the unorganised category. This sector employs approximately seven million skill-based professionals, mostly from the weaker sections of society, according to industry estimates. Two out of three employees in the industry are women or migrant workers who have been the worst hit by the extended lockdowns.

When the lockdown was lifted, the entrepreneurs showed a desire to adapt their businesses to the new reality but did not have the resources to do so. Innovative financing in the form of a returnable grant was the solution here. Under the Salon-I program, Godrej became the mentor of these businesses and funded this particular initiative. The entrepreneurs were provided with small ticket sized grants ranging from INR 5000 to INR 20000 which was to be used as working capital to restart and build the resilience of their respective businesses. 

The entrepreneurs had only a moral obligation to repay the grant given to them with the vision that if the money comes back, it will be used to aid more such entrepreneurs in the network. A total of INR 55 lakhs has been disbursed among 472 beautypreneurs so far.

For His Family’s Happiness

Daud Shaikh, who loves his family and constantly travels across State lines to spend time with them, recently realised how identity documents can add value to his life

In 2011, Daud Shaikh, then an 18-year-old farmer, migrated from his village in Jharkhand to Mumbai. He managed to find work as a construction worker in the city. Ten years on, Daud works as a mason at the Shapoorji Pallonji construction site in Powai, Mumbai. 

Prior to his marriage, he used to stay in the city for one-two years at a stretch. Now a father of three, he shuttles between his village and the city every three-four months despite his economic compulsions.