By shifting its focus from education to the larger issue of poverty, Axis Bank Foundation is proving effective in addressing the livelihood issue in underprivileged India
Why were children still dropping out of schools, wondered Babu Joseph, executive trustee and CEO of Axis Bank Foundation (ABF). It was 2010. His organisation had been working closely with NGOs in some of the poorest areas of the country, but to little avail. Since 2006, when ABF was set up (as UTI Bank Foundation before the name change to Axis Bank took place in 2007), education had been its primary focus but, over the years, the results had not been encouraging. “We often saw children dropping out of school and we found that poverty was the reason for that. These were areas which had not seen any growth in terms of income as well as development,” says Joseph.
Among the worrisome areas was Jharkhand, where ABF was working with the Nav Bharat Jagriti Kendra, an NGO that concentrated on supplementary education for classes 8 to 10, particularly in courses related to maths and sciences. The NGO had found that kids were dropping out as their parents were continually on the move in the search for livelihood.
A similar trend was observed in the slums of Delhi where kids had to leave school since families were returning to their native places due to lack of jobs and looking for work on the farms.
Joseph phoned Shikha Sharma, managing director and CEO of Axis Bank, and asked for a meeting. This was in June 2010, a busy time for Sharma. It had only been a year since she had taken up the top job and already had her plate full. But he got his meeting and explained to her that there was an increasing trend in the dropout rate of kids and that vitiated the foundation’s focus on primary education. Sharma told him to dig deeper and assess the reasons behind this trend. Within the next three months, and after talking to various people in the field, Joseph was convinced about the link between the dropout rate on the one hand, and poverty and migration on the other.
The shift in focus to sustainable livelihood—and tackling the problem at the root—was the obvious solution. “Once people find stable jobs, they will not have any problems sending their kids to school,” Sharma told Joseph.
The next steps were clear: Joseph and his team engaged with four NGOs who were working on sustainable livelihoods. He started with Development of Humane Action (Dhan) Foundation, a Madurai-based organisation that works on improving livelihoods using innovative themes. Among those initiatives is the cleaning up of the lakes and tanks so that women do not travel distances to fetch water. Through this programme, ABF worked with 30,000 families, training the women through self-help groups in kitchen gardening and animal husbandry, among other areas.
“The focus for Axis Foundation is that we want to see the income of these people grow and see how we can help them achieve this. We work very closely, and on a long-term basis, with our NGOs so that these goals can be sustainable,” says Sharma. As with Dhan, ABF outsources its programmes to other NGOs that are experts in their fields. How it works is, ABF identifies a cause and connects it to the appropriate NGO, and, thereafter, monitors the work. The association is similar to that in project finance where targets and achievements are well-rewarded. For instance, ABF has even worked with NGOs such as People’s Rural Education Movement that work on making tribal youth employable.
Source: http://forbesindia.com/article/philanthropy-awards-2014/fixing-the-big-picture-axis-bank/39287/1
