India COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund

Dear Global Givers,

We are happy to share an update from our COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund campaign. Your unwavering support towards the campaign is enabling poor rural families and vulnerable women and girls to seek alternate livelihood options. The aftermath of the pandemic is still felt amongst rural poor communities.

According to World Bank, Indians account for 80% of Those Who Became Poor Globally in 2020 Due to COVID-19. With rising food and energy prices and heightened climate change, the road ahead for poor communities remains a challenge. 

At iPartner India, we are continuing to focus on helping these communities become economically self-sustained post-COVID. We are also working closely with vulnerable women and girls so that they are allowed to find alternate livelihoods.

UPDATE FROM THE FIELD

• During this reporting period, 540 families have received support to set up kitchen gardens in their backyards. Various winter season seeds have been distributed. The kitchen garden is helping these families to increase their savings and nutrition intake. 
• 20 families have also set up their nurseries and one training has been organized for them on sustainable farming techniques to build their resilience for future challenges related to the climate.
• Through the education scholarship program, 160 unique scholars have been enrolled in regular and boarding schools. Without the scholarships, these children would have dropped out of school.
• 109 children and women who were not able to continue their studies due to various reasons including the pandemic were enrolled in distance learning/open schooling and are continuing their education.
• More than 100 women and youth have been trained during the pandemic in marketing, entrepreneurship, and skill building. These women and youth are now involved in the marketing of sanitary napkins, in poultry, goats, and spice-making units. They are now earning and contributing to their family income.
• After the pandemic, many female sex workers lost their livelihood. With no income, these women faced the great risk of hunger and poverty. Our team on the ground responded to the situation by providing alternate livelihood options to 25 women and rigorous follow-up is being done to help them prepare a marketing plan which continuously generates profit for them.
• A woman from a marginalized community in Rajasthan had to shut her shop due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Her children also dropped out of school. Through this campaign and the support provided to her through the Self Help Group (SHG), she has been able to open a grocery store in her village to sustain her family. Her children have also started going to school again.
• 15 women from the resource-poor community attended 3 days of training at Central Sheep Wool Research Institute (CSWRI) in Rajasthan on maintenance of the goat units. Participants received guidance improvising breeding and caring for the goats. The women need funds to establish their goat unit. This activity has been helpful during the pandemic to make families financially self-sufficient.

Despite all the challenges, we are grateful for your support. We still have a long way to achieve our campaign target and help these communities live a life without the fear of hunger and safety for their children.

We will continue to raise funds both online and offline so that these families can support themselves. Do continue to champion our cause and give them a ray of hope to live a life with dignity.

With deep gratitude,
Team iPartner India

Dear Global Givers, 

Thank you for your continued support towards iPartner India’s COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund. Through your support in the past year, we were able to focus on providing support for healthcare, food and shelter. 

The devastating effect of the pandemic, especially on the poor and vulnerable communities continues to impact lives. The gap in social and economic inequities has made adolescent girls and women even more vulnerable. Many resource-poor families continue to face extreme financial crunch and are slowly beginning to rebuild their lives. iPartner India is mapping such vulnerable families in the intervention villages and providing the required support to them. So far the needs of 1,000 families have been mapped.

UPDATE FROM THE FIELD 

We are currently working with those families who have lost their source of livelihood and children who have dropped out of school due to financial constraints through various initiatives. One such initiative is ensuring food security by supporting more than 600 families to start kitchen gardens in their backyards.

Those children who were not able to pay their fees during the pandemic have been provided scholarships with additional teaching support to help them cover up the study loss during the pandemic.

In addition, we are also working with more than 50 sex workers who could not find work during the pandemic. The loss of livelihood left them with severe debts. Through our initiative, we are supporting these women with seed money to start alternate micro businesses by selling tea, grocery and cosmetic products. The support has been provided after various rounds of counselling to them and helping them prepare a business plan to sustain their efforts.

We need to focus on how to rebuild and restore these vulnerable families. It is only through your sustained support that these children who have dropped out of school can go back to school, families can feed their children and the former sex workers can find alternative livelihoods. 

We remain committed to supporting remaining vulnerable women and children and we hope you will continue to lend us your support and solidarity.

With deep gratitude, 
Team iPartner India

Dear Global Givers,

Thank you for your sustained support towards iPartner India COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund. Through this update, we are happy to present the impact of your donation and how far we have been able to support vulnerable communities through your support.

Besides the loss of human lives, unemployment and loss of livelihood continue to affect the poor. We are continuing to monitor the situation on the ground and help those families that have very little to survive on.

Here’s one such story where iPartner India has reached out to and continues to engage with Meena’s family and provide support whenever they need it.

Meena (name changed) is from the Nat community, a community that practices inter-generational sex work. She has two children, a daughter and a son. Her husband is an alcoholic and does not contribute to support his family.

Meena used to work as a domestic help in her village. Her son is 20 years old and was not doing anything. Through iPartner India’s project Rakshan, he was supported to complete his 10th grade exam. Meena’s daughter is also studying in 10th grade. She is bright and intelligent and is keen to complete her studies. When her daughter passed her 8th grade, Meena wanted to send her daughter to Mumbai to enter sex work so that she could earn and support her family. With continued counselling and support from the field team, Meena attended a gender training where she finally decided not to send her daughter to Mumbai.

Today her daughter is one of iPartner India’s Rakshan scholars. Meena earned a meagre INR 2,000 per month through domestic work. But when the nationwide lockdown took place, many of the girls came back from Mumbai and they started doing all the household work themselves. Hence Meena lost her only source of income. The responsibility of taking care of her family rested on her. Buying rations for the family became very difficult. She had to borrow money to buy food but could barely last for ten days. She was in a crisis and there was nobody to help her. Meena’s husband lives with his mother and although he has a Public Distribution System card, which gives them access to Government aid, he refuses to share it with his family. Through iPartner India’s COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund
campaign, Meena received food and medical supplies to help her family sustain themselves during the second lockdown.

Thank you, Global Givers, for walking this journey with us.

With deep gratitude,
Team iPartner India

Dear Global Givers,

Thank you for your continued support to iPartner India’s COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund. Your support has been crucial to thousands of vulnerable families who have lost their livelihood and are dependent on your support to provide them with food and medical supplies.

Even as the country opened up the lockdown, many resource-poor families continue to feel the impact of how the pandemic turned their lives upside down. Loss of livelihood, food shortage and access to health care amongst the urban and rural poor who are mostly daily wage labourers are still struggling to make their ends meet.

As per the report published by Azim Premji University, around 23 crore Indians have been pushed into poverty during the past one year. The finding of the report also further states that the rural poverty rate increased by 15 percentage points and the urban poverty rate was up nearly 20 points.

With new variants of COVID-19 being discovered, resource-poor communities have become even more vulnerable. Along with our partners on the ground, we are keeping vigilant and accessing the situation to ensure that food and medical supplies will be provided to those families that need urgent attention.

iPartner India is also continuously working on making communities resilient to a similar crisis. We have connected the resource-poor families to various government schemes to avail benefits through facilitation of identity/BPL (below poverty line) documents. The affected families have also been mentored to generate an alternate source of income through other livelihood options.

Thank you Global Givers for walking this journey with us. Wishing you all a very Happy Holidays and we look forward to your continued support in the coming year.

With deep gratitude,

Team iPartner India

Dear Global Givers,

It is with deep gratitude and sincere appreciation that we write to you to share an update on how your support enabled us to reach out to some of the most vulnerable communities during the second wave of COVID-19 in India. With your generous support towards iPartner India’s COVID-19 Emergency Relief Campaign, we reached out to frontline workers who needed emergency medical treatment, provided families with food and medical supplies and purchased 10 oxygen concentrators to support critical patients. The outpouring of generosity and support from Global Givers has been phenomenal.

As the second wave of Covid-19 swept through India, iPartner India initiated the COVID Emergency Relief Campaign to raise funds to support resource-poor families and vulnerable communities who needed urgent medical assistance, food and medical supplies and oxygen concentrators for critically ill patients.

India recorded well over 350,000 positive cases each day - the highest figures recorded in any country at any point during the pandemic. The second wave in recent months has overwhelmed the healthcare system, leaving hospitals struggling to cope and critical drugs and oxygen in short supply. India is only the third in the world to record more than 300,000 deaths - behind the US and Brazil but the real number of fatalities might be much higher as many deaths are not officially recorded.

During the second wave of COVID crisis, iPartner India started the COVID Emergency Relief Campaign. Racing against time, we were able to reach out to our partners on the ground who critically needed our support to provide ration, medical assistance, oxygen concentrators and basic essentials to vulnerable communities to survive the second wave.

With your support, we have successfully distributed ration to these families along with the required medicines and nutrition supplements and oxygen concentrators.

Having totally failed to prepare for the second wave despite the warnings from experts, now officials and health authorities are saying that a possibility of a third wave in India is inevitable.

To all of us at iPartner India, YOU are our real heroes and we THANK YOU for helping us reach out to those people who desperately need our help.

We could not have done this without your support.

With deep gratitude,

Team iPartner India