What we do

Each of these initiatives aims to create opportunities for women and the youth and reduce at least a few layers of obstacles to participate equally in the labour force. Creation of products and services that suit their need (for savings, loan, insurance etc), improving their access to skill, markets, technology and business development services, investment in quality childcare support and in infrastructure that supports women’s safe access to economic opportunities forms the mainstay of the portfolio. This aligns with the expressed and felt needs of women across most developing countries. 

For a country like India, Bangladesh and partly even in our core geographies in Africa where having a savings account in a financial institution is the gateway to accessing benefits of several schemes and entitlements, apart from easy access to credit facilities, financial inclusion is an effective step in the direction of reducing poverty.  However, 42 percent of women remain outside of the formal financial systems. RAF Global promotes and strengthens self-help groups of women in order to improve poor women’s access to financial services along with aiding their financial deepening. Social enterprise funds have been set up to aid low-cost loaning to the Self Help Groups for ushering women-centric economic enterprises. A greater emphasis has been placed in improving women’s access to digital financial services so that they can access a wide array of financial products and services from government and the private sector, and aid security and prosperity for themselves, their families and communities at large. This has provided efficient ways to connect people with Banks, market and state not only to aid their economic growth but also reduce gender disparity. 

When youth are empowered with skills they need for working life, they thrive. They not only support themselves, but also their families and communities at large.  Access to skilling and up-skilling opportunities for women and youth throughout their productive years (as per identified sectors and industries with high demand for workforce), along with creation of an ecosystem of bouquet of services and support where their small businesses grow, are undertaken by RAF Global in order to ensure a path of resilience and recovery, greatly reducing their dependency on national and global markets for job creation. 

It remains a key challenge in low-income countries (in the context of poor) that employment growth has largely created jobs of poor quality that have little tangible impact on improving livelihoods of marginalised communities. RAF Global’s endeavour for women and youth will be across the spectrum of decent work opportunities- in wage employment, self-employment and enterprise development by individuals and women’s and youth groups that could create work avenues for more people in disadvantaged rural and urban settings. 

Organic farming is defined by its method of production i.e it does not use pesticides or fertilisers in farming but uses crop rotations and mix farm strategies with mulch/compost/animal manure or green manure to build the soil’s organic matter. Conservation Agriculture is an approach that limits soil disturbance to a minimum, maintaining soil cover and diversifying crop production. It was mainly developed to reduce soil erosion and restore degraded soil. It also provides an entry point for climate change adaptation. RAF Global aggressively promotes both the technologies i.e Organic Farming and Conservation Agriculture as they adapt to climate challenges, can be easily implemented by farmers themselves with little inputs, and ensures sustained productivity and secured livelihoods.  

System of Rice Intensification is another CSA technology that RAF Global aims to popularize among small and marginal farmers that involves individual transplantation of young seedlings, maintaining wide spacing between plants, alternate period of wetting and drying and the regular use of a mechanical weeder. It has resulted towards higher overall yield with less water consumption and lowered greenhouse gas emissions. Plants many a times also have more grain per panicle.

Through its emphasis on E-Agriculture, RAF Global aims to target the youth population in rural areas which is moving away from agriculture and is likely to be unemployed or underemployed. RAF Global will harness this group’s penetration and familiarity with technology usage to make them work productively in agriculture, using information and communication technologies. The intervention aims to bridge the technology gap of small farm producers through youth as change agents and overall, build climate resilient and sustainable agricultural practices, including access to expert advice around sourcing cost-effective and soil/climate appropriate farm inputs, smart agriculture practices, post harvest handling, agriculture disaster management, better access to market/trade, and farmer centric safety net and financial inclusion services.  

Water is a fundamental input to global agriculture, be it in the form of rain fed sources or pumped irrigation. As per The World’s Water- a Biennial report on Freshwater resources, approximately 70% of freshwater withdrawal is for agriculture (covering irrigation, livestock and aquaculture purposes).  In 2014, 3.99 trillion m3 freshwater withdrawals per year were reported. World’s growing population, present volume of freshwater withdrawal and climate changes require us to rethink water scarcity concerns. Existing practices affect groundwater, cause water logging, soil salinity, affect soil health and crop productivity. 

RAF Global promotes and popularizes micro irrigation practices along with investing in building traditional water harvesting structures in arid and semi arid regions to promote agriculture especially targeting small and marginal farmers. It has clear benefits for increasing farm yield and sustainability of agriculture practices. RAF Global also supports interventions in the area of promoting the practice of drip irrigation among small and marginal farmers that includes building awareness, bringing various stakeholders together such as the government agriculture extension department, farmers, financial services providers for offering financial support and also private sector drip irrigation suppliers for promoting a shift to the DI technology. Beside these, effective water governance forms a core intervention of RAF Global in order to ensure more equitable and judicious use of water from common sources.

RAF Global’s health interventions cover both, the novel infectious, chronic, and non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and the Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) since we understand that these diseases disproportionately affect low-income economies and further stress the already weak health systems in these regions, create exorbitant costs at the household level, affect individual productivity, including loss of income and may further push people into poverty and debt.

Among the critical diseases, RAF Global focuses mainly on cancer, which is the 2nd leading cause of death globally, responsible for 10 million deaths in 2018. Beyond NCDs, leprosy, cataract, and access to eye care for an aging population, hearing impairment and cleft surgeries for children are areas where RAF Global has brought together resources and specialized skills to successfully address the needs of disadvantaged communities across Asia and Africa, who have little access to specialized health care services and voice in policy influence. Leprosy for example, though eliminated globally, yet it affects 2,00,000 people every year as new cases, and causes some form of disability in millions, across the globe. Similarly, the global figures for eye care are alarming. According to Dr.Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, “it is unacceptable that 65 million people are blind or have impaired sight when their vision could have been corrected overnight with a cataract operation…” With regard to hearing impairment, globally, 1.5 billion people live with some degree of hearing loss out of which, 430 million require rehabilitation services for their hearing loss. Another disease which RAF Global endeavours to address is Thalassemia, considering that the disease affects approximately 4.4 of every 10,000 live births throughout the world. It is more prevalent in tropical and subtropical regions of the world.

RAF Global’s intervention on the above diseases focuses on creating awareness about them in communities, strengthening systems for preventive healthcare, supporting detection, specialized care including surgeries, and promoting effective referral service programmes. With regard to hearing care, the foundation makes the hearing devices accessible to disadvantaged individuals thus restoring their communication with the world and putting a stop to exclusion due to the impairment.

Effective health systems remain a driving force for better public health and well-being. There are regions within our core geographies that grapple with grossly deficient healthcare systems plaguing health services. RAF Global supports the expansion of health systems by providing those areas with a chance to be healthy and prosperous with poor people accessing better quality affordable healthcare facilities. This is achieved mainly by strengthening the public healthcare system and supporting government interventions, vaccinations and extending healthcare access to remote areas through camps for diagnosing health issues at early stages as well as to provide proper emergency care. Maternal health and child care has been one of the key areas of impact, where RAF Global committed its resources for strengthening the public healthcare system. Apart from strengthening health systems, we deliver essential health care in complex operating environments.

Access to clean water and sanitation is deeply linked to poverty. It is estimated that globally, 2.4 billion people worldwide do not have adequate sanitation facilities and 663 million do not have access to improved drinking water sources. Through its Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) program, RAF Global contributes towards the prevention of Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) in its project areas in Asia and Africa. These diseases thrive where people do not have access to water and sanitation facilities. RAF Global builds boreholes, water tanks and latrines in the under-resourced settings, creates awareness among school children on hand-washing practices and menstrual hygiene (for adolescent girls), and sets up safe drinking water facilities and toilets in schools. As a long-term commitment to sanitation, RAF Global has endeavoured to develop a sustainable system of solid waste management in one district of Gujarat, in India, working in partnership with the village panchayat i.e the third stratum of governance.

Social safety nets are critical in the protection and welfare of the poorest. RAF Global views the contribution of SSN not merely in terms of impact on the challenged families, but also their systemic benefits-in enabling better food security, household consumption and human capital at large.  RAF Global works towards strengthening SSN in marginalized areas by building access of poor and vulnerable households as well as through its nutrition supplements program.  In addition to the strength meal programme, RAF Global also endeavours to fill the critical gap in survival needs of vulnerable age groups such as senior citizens and young children living on the streets, as well as pre-primary school level children, enrolled at various early childhood development centres in certain resource-constrained regions, across Asia and Africa.

Digital technology has been at the forefront of development in many countries that have leveraged it for economic growth and for improving the lives and livelihoods of citizens. In the next 5 years, the number of mobile phone users will reach 5.9 billion – or 71 percent of the world’s population. The majority of these new users will be in Sub-saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia where mobile phones enable access to e-commerce, digital financial tools, educational materials, and a range of other services. Digital inclusion, however, remains a challenging area with, half of the world’s population without internet access, mostly in developing countries. In its core geographies, the internet penetration is much less in rural areas compared to urban areas and more women and girls tend to be offline than men. 

Considering that the digital divide is a gendered one, and creates an impediment to self-advancement for girls as well as boys living in economic poverty and other disadvantages, RAF Global invests in providing equal access and exposure to information technology in schools that involves supporting IT infrastructure, broadband access, ICT devices and a plethora of other products to enable internet aided learning. In an increasingly interconnected world, RAF Global employs technology as a power play to aid scale, efficiency and learning outcomes in schools.  Overall, the efforts are in the direction of increasing the number of youth who have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship.

RAF Global believes that the early years in a child’s life are critical in many ways. It, therefore, endeavors to improve the teaching and learning environment in pre-primary schools/centres in Africa and Asia, (covering both the rural and urban areas) and promote higher transition rates to primary grades in schools. In poverty-stricken societies that face a host of other unstable conditions in the social and political environment, there is likely to be stress, reduced parental involvement and depleted home learning environment that profoundly affects poor children’s cognitive and emotional well-being. Well-functioning pre-primary schools/centres in such neighbourhoods often fill the critical gaps in care, nutrition and developing structured engagement to facilitate appropriate development in young children. RAF Global’s support is demonstrating results in this area and its curriculum for parents and guidance to them in child-rearing by the centre teachers offer real-life solutions for the child’s development. RAF Global is working to improve early years learning and also keep costs on the policy agenda of various governments across all levels. 

RAF Global believes that school infrastructure has an important role in the development of an inclusive and effective education system. RAF Global, therefore, invests in improving the learning environment in schools and hostels through buildings, classrooms, libraries, laboratories, and equipment in resource-poor regions/schools.  This is objectively supported by a plethora of teacher training around pedagogical and content development. There is strong evidence that high-quality infrastructure with high-skilled teachers facilitate better learning outcomes, and reduces dropout rates, among other benefits. RAF Global’s initiatives particularly target to increase the rate of retention and transition of girls to senior school and create an encouraging environment for girls’ education with enhanced learning outcomes. The investment in school sanitation blocks for girls and boys similarly, creates equal access to essential facilities within the school and promotes care of personal hygiene among adolescent girls.

RAF Global recognises that education must provide its learners with the knowledge, skills, attitude and values to lead productive lives, make informed decisions and contribute as responsible citizens in the wider society to foster peaceful societies, practice gender equality, sustainable living and health and well-being for all. RAF Global invests in building leadership in school students through a range of initiatives integrated with sports and cultural activities. RAF Global will partner and invest in organisations developing value-based education systems and strategies to optimize behaviour promoting pluralism, environmental sustainability, interpersonal skills and social cohesion.

Enabling demand-supply connect for effective public sectors  

Prioritizing and provisioning of public services to best reflect the pressing local demand remains a daunting task in the specific geographies where RAF Global remains active. RAF Global attempts to connect the demand and supply side of governance by developing multiple mechanisms and empowering channels that interface citizens with their immediate governments, in order to align public resources around the needs and aspirations of the local communities, especially women. The civil society which remains the reservoir of formal and informal organizations outside of state control is also encouraged to effectively articulate and voice community needs at appropriate platforms in order to increase public influence in policy and services of sub-national Governments. Enabling demand-supply linkages has created appropriate platforms for citizen and their collectives to concurrently express their voices and concerns for increased citizen-centric public budgeting and allocation.  

 A wide range of e mechanisms has been further employed for mainstreaming government schemes and entitlements among the poor and marginalized section of the society, especially women by bridging the digital divide and sustain last-mile reach out and follow up.
  

Public Accountability

World Economic Forum estimates the global cost of corruption at $2.6 trillion, or 5 percent of the global gross domestic product (GDP) knocking out the chances for millions to come out of grinding poverty. Corruption hits the poor hardest.  RAF Global operates in countries and geographies with some of the highest corruption levels as per the corruption perception index released by Transparency International, in the last five years. Poverty, development, growth, and investment-all suffer at the hands of corruption.  Hence, public accountability remains the most compelling aspect of RAF Global’s endeavour to promote good governance.

Increasingly, RAF Global has focused on the “demand side of governance,” that involves social accountability, or the capacity of citizens to demand greater responsiveness from public services and institutions. RAF Global conducts a broad range of actions and mechanisms that empowers citizens, communities, and civil society organizations to demand for better public services by voicing their concerns and hold public officials and departments accountable. These include participatory budgeting, public expenditure tracking, monitoring, and audit of public services delivery through citizen report cards, social audit, etc at the sub-national level. A wider array of e mechanisms too has been employed for effective provisioning of public service by highlighting gaps for remedial action resulting in better flow, quality, and outreach of public services.