AIILSG’s contributions and innovations for COVID-19 relief, resilience building

AIILSG’s COVID-19 relief and resilience building efforts have positively impacted more than 3,00,000 under-privileged populations from 76 pre-dominantly tribal villages, and more than 63 slum units

he intensive efforts by AIILSG team in challenging field conditions would not have been possible without whole-hearted support from all of its partners – such as Grand Challenges Canada, EagleBurgmann Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), HDFC Bank CSR, MUFG Bank CSR, National Stock Exchange Foundation, TATA Rallis (Chemicals) CSR, TATA Technologies CSR, etc. Their support has been instrumental in making the below-mentioned contributions towards the cause. AIILSG’s Corporate Social Responsibility Centre established at its International Centre of EQUI-T since 2017 was the key hub in synergizing with these partnerships.
Moreover, considerable credit goes to the AIILSG’s grassroots team of Shikshan Mitras and Aarogya Doots who doubled up as AIILSG’s COVID-19 Warriors. A key strength of AIILSG’s approach is building a cadre of local community para-professionals/ educators which proved to be very instrumental. This ensured that despite the COVID-19 disruptions and lockdown measures, AIILSG could continue and upscale its humble contributions as most of its Enablers of development were from the respective local areas. Many of them being women has been an instrumental factor in uprooting gender stereotypes and enabling gender equality.
Another crucial niche of these humble contributions is in sync with AIILSG’s global niche to be working at scale with all types of under-privileged: indigenous forest dweller tribes, indigenous nomadic tribes, particularly vulnerable tribals groups, rural poor, urban slum dwellers, differently-abled [disabled], socially discriminated such as those from Scheduled Castes. An important COVID-19 strategy was to customize the interventions to the locations and communities as per their respective socio-economic profiles, and anthropological characteristics (especially for the indigenous forest dwellers and nomadic tribes). The entire efforts were tailor-made based on scientific needs assessment and through community-participation, building on the community-participatory-institutions fostered by AIILSG and synergy with the local governments. AIILSG’s sensitivity and commitment towards the disadvantaged populations is manifested through its International Centre of Equity and Inclusion for Transformation (ICEQUI-T). International Center of EQUI-T is the Social Innovations Lab of AIILSG which consistently strives to enable effective social transformation through innovations, field actions, research, capacity building, policy analysis and knowledge management for the cause of under-privileged populations. Moreover, considering the gravity of each set of issues faced by the disadvantaged, following sub-centres of AIILSG are formed under the aegis of AIILSG’s ICEQUI-T, namely:
Centre for RMNCH+A (Centre for Reproductive Maternal, New-born, Child and Adolescent Health)
Centre for Children’s Rights
International Centre for Women in Deprivation
International Centre for Differently Abled
Center for Rural & Tribal Development and for Empowerment of Denotified & Nomadic Tribes’
Corporate Social Responsibility Centre
Given the holistic approach AIILSG works with, the above sub-centres converge their efforts as ICEQUI-T for effective and efficient social transformation. The envisioning by the team identified relief, risk-reduction and resilience building as the key pillars of its COVID-19 strategy.
The customized COVID-19 innovations developed by AIILSG have been receiving wide acclaim. These include: COVID-19 jigsaw puzzles, IEC on COVID-19 in six languages, IEC on mental health, BAL-TARFAH experiential learning, COVID-19 hygiene kits, COVID-19 resilience building through ‘Shikshan Ranjan Kendras’ in the community, tribal folk songs adapted for COVID-19 IEC including for addressing Vaccination Hesitancy, and resilience building through expansion of livelihoods portfolio.
Various sub-centres (dedicated towards the cause of the under-privileged populations) of AIILSG under ICEQUI-T synergized to have a coordinated response. Their efforts converged as AIILSG at the grassroots. It was a well-coordinated effort whereby AIILSG’s ICEQUI-T team identified & clearly defined the roles and responsibilities of each sub-centre, needs for developing innovations and time-frame. A coordination mechanism of sub-centre heads was established to make it a highly systematic and efficient effort together as AIILSG.
Apart from the obvious aspects related to WASH and COVID-19 appropriate behaviour, AIILSG created a holistic impact as elucidated below imbibing sustainability and futuristics.

The key impacts attained are as below

1. COVID-19 resilience built for more than 3,00,000 disadvantaged populations Enabled outreach for 139 local-government units in terms of COVID-19 tracking, follow-up and vaccination. Many team members worked as ‘Gram Aarogya Suraksha Dal’ members and community volunteers with the local governments
2. Built capacities of 438 community institutions (including 219 Baal Panchayats), 876 community youth volunteers
   
3. Community-embedded ‘Shikshan Ranjan Kendras’ enabled continuation of teaching and learning with demonstration of positive learning outcomes for 17,000 disadvantaged children from Maharashtra, Delhi, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu despite COVID-19 disruptions and related educational lockdowns. The focus has been on preventing learning loss and attainment of foundational literacy and numeracy skills for the children in elementary in light of COVID-19 induced school closure
   
4. Bridging the Language Barrier through ‘BHASHA SETU’ which is ‘Bilingual Teaching Learning Material’ developed and adopted to bridge the language barrier for 2881 tribal children to gain learning
   
5. Created newer avenues for experiential learning and vocational exposure such as AIILSG’s innovation of Baal TARFAH
   
6. Resilience building characterised by further risk proofing of the livelihoods of the poor, including expanding their livelihoods portfolio (eg successfully pioneering strawberry crop cultivation with tribals in highly poverty ridden Palghar district) further enriching AIILSG’s innovative model for tribal and rural development: Transformative Actions for Rural development, Food Security and Health
   
7. With forward and backward linkages to livelihoods in disarray, AIILSG’s team played a crucial enabler role in ensuring pre-emption of this disruption or restoration as need be
   
8. Nutrition and immunity: COVID-19 has highlighted importance of immunity-enablers and nutrition. The nutritional status, especially of disadvantaged children and women, has otherwise taken a big hit. AIILSG pre-empted this by furthering its MAMTA (Movement Against Malnutrition for Transformative Actions) movement to many more. This involves enabling plantation of nutritious kitchen gardens by location-customized vegetables and herbs. This was further augmented by developing AIILSG’s innovation of herbal gardens, with 3 sub-types of it.
   The following text elucidates role played by each sub-institutional entity of AIILSG under its ICEQUI-T:

Corporate Social Responsibility Centre

AIILSG through its Corporate Social Responsibility Center synergised with its Corporate CSR partners for COVID-19 related interventions.

Centre for Children’s Rights

Community-embedded
Shikshan Ranjan Kendras
Since the incidence of COVID-19 in March 2020, the community-embedded Shikshan Ranjan Kendras (CSRK) of AIILSG are the only source for continued education for the under-privileged children. Weathering the COVID-19 pandemic, the CSRK has emerged as a scalable education-delivery model that proved to be robust, resilient, adaptable and effective during COVID-19 disruptions for the children left-behind due to school-closure & lack of access to
digital-education.
While respecting the COVID-19 lockdown measures, AIILSG ensured continued education and counselling of children (and their parents) through learning at doorsteps approach. A key strength of the C-SRK model whereby a Community-embedded SRK is mentored by a well-trained Shikshan Mitra from the local community proved to be a crucial factor to ensure continued education of the children in various responsive and responsible forms such as Learning-at-Doorsteps, or in small batches of five or less children, ‘mobile library’ to read books adhering to COVID-19 safety norms. The COVID-19 disruptions and educational lockdowns have deepened educational inequality and learning crisis for the most marginalised children belonging to indigenous tribal populations and rendered them most-vulnerable to risks. Most of these children have no or highly impoverished access to digital education. The ‘Community-embedded Shikshan Ranjan Kendra’ (Learning-with-Fun Centers) of AIILSG provided-
1.  Last mile connectivity to the most marginalised indigenous tribal children and hard-to-reach children from indigenous Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (stigmatized as born-criminals since 1871 British colonial era, girls are subjected to physical and sexual-violence) and Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (many children are first-generation-learners),
2.  Special focus is on education of girls and differently-abled children,
3.  Enabled their access to learning and education with enriched learning environment and quality teaching-learning inputs.
4.  Enabled ‘resilience building’, safety and mental well-being of children, inculcated life-skills in them including safe WASH & COVID-19 Appropriate-Behaviour.
5.  Strengthened capacity & up-skilling of community-educators and School Teachers in developing and/or delivering Digital Teaching-Learning Content.

The field-proven CSRKs enabled continuation of education for the most marginalised 17000 children including 6232 hard-to-reach indigenous tribal children, strengthened capacities of 282 community educators, 282 local-governments, equal number of schools and 564 teachers. AIILSG’s Innovation of COVID-19 jig saw puzzles: This set of nine jigsaw puzzles has proved to be very effective is enabling the children to understand about COVID-19 in fun edu-tainment way.
Covid Hygiene Kit for children: Each of the children attending the SRK was provided with a COVID-19 kit. The kit comprising washable face masks, hand gloves, soap cakes for hand wash, napkins for hand wipe and special items for raising awareness about covid-19 and sanitizer were provided for each SRK.
Children as agents of transforming the society: This is a fundamental tenet of AIILSG’s CSRK model whereby children are not viewed as merely passive recipient of benefits, but are active enablers of societal transformation with age-appropriate fun edu-tainment initiatives. AIILSG team has been utilising for more than 10 years creative media such as street theatre and puppet shows with participation of children as an effective way of social transformation. The same were COVID-19 customized, through nukkad-performances (instead of public performances) and whatsapp dissemination (wherever feasible).
Baal Panchayats and youth volunteers fostered by AIILSG played very crucial part in this. AIILSG perceives this as an important effort in building a progressive and knowledgeable local leadership for future.

Centre for RMNCH+A

The horizon of the Centre for RMNCH+A (Centre for Reproductive, Maternal, New-born, Child and Adolescent Health) was expanded to include the pandemics, and has been the knowledge-hub for the team. For updating knowledge, AIILSG’s Centre for RMNCH+A deputed its experts to a course conducted by World Health Organization (WHO). And subsequently an in-house training was organized for all our field staff immediately after that. Our strategic planners decided all possible actions by field staff.
An immediate need identified in the initial stages of the COVID-19 incidence was to demystify it, and pre-empt mis-information and mass-panic on the issue. Considering extremely low literacy levels among the disadvantaged populations AIILSG works with at the grassroots, a key challenge was to demystify COVID-19 in terms and ways easily understandable by even illiterates and children. This led to development of innovative IEC – Pictorial Posters, Tribal Folk Songs, which is visual in nature and its decoding is education-status neutral.
The Centre for RMNCH+A undertook extensive web-based capacity building of the team members. The Centre is running a COVID-19 help-desk analogous since March-end last year.

Crystallizing new specialisation of AIILSG: Mental Health

The detrimental impact of COVID-19 towards mental health, especially of children, started emerging soon after April 2020. For the under-privileged populations AIILSG works with, the impact was more severe due to combination of various factors such as inherent poverty-perpetuated-vulnerability, uncertainties, etc. Counselling of children and parents has been a part of the CSRK model since the beginning. It was further invigorated with COVID-19 context. AIILSG also has been keeping the issue on radar while liaising with the government machinery so that it also emphasizes its importance through own channels.
The Centre developed innovative customized training module and IEC comprising 74 posters in 5 sub-themes of mental health:
1. Potential symptoms
2. Mentally healthy child,
3. Parenting: Do’s and Don’ts for child mental health,
4. When to consult a mental health professional for a child’s mental health, and
5. Worrisome child behavior during COVID pandemic.

Dissemination of the innovative IEC of AIILSG was ensured by displaying these posters in large size at prominent places like walls near Gram Panchayats, key anchor locations in slums, SRK and of houses of children etc.

International Centre for Women-in-Deprivation

Gendered-significance of the effort was contextualised and defined for AIILSG’s ICEQUI-T team, which was enabled by the Head of the AIILSG’s ICWID (She is also a co-author of this article). This aspect has special significance as many of the field areas involve communities with conservative gender norms. Generally, COVID-19 has its impact on increasing gender disparities and gender discrimination. Increase in violence (in all forms) against women and girls emerged as a shadow pandemic in hindsight of COVID-19 pandemic. The team took conscious efforts to enable gender equality.
1. Many of AIILSG’s COVID-19 warriors / change makers/ enablers at the grassroots being women has been an instrumental factor in uprooting gender stereotypes and enabling gender equality. This has been a consistent and cross cutting endeavour across all initiatives undertaken by the team, whereby preferably atleast 50 per cent team members are women
2. Sensitisation and capacity building sessions were conducted for the COVID-19 warriors on the aspects of gender equality and taking this process further in their respective communities
3. There has been consistent endeavour across field locations to sensitise community including women and men/ girls and boys on the aspects of women and girls safety,continuation of education of girls (with counselling to parents to pre-empt any school dropouts of girls), re-enrolment of school-dropout girls, age-appropriate Sexuality Education (eg good touch, bad touch, information on helpline numbers), imbibing messages of equal treatment for girls/ women and inculcating good behavioural practices in children for the same from a young age through mentorship by these change makers and creating awareness in community about gender equality by observing International and National days of significance such as ‘International Women’s Day’, ‘National Women’s Day’, ‘Mothers’ Day’, ‘National Girl Child Day’, and similar other occasions
4. Another hitherto neglected aspect in disadvantaged communities (slums, tribal and rural areas) is promoting education in ‘science’ and as career path for girls and overall lack of ‘scientific temperament’ in girls and women which is also linked with their poor educational status. Understanding the crucial significance of this and building scientific temper in children from the young age, an innovation of ‘MY SDG4 and Innovations with Disadvantaged Children’ = “Mentoring by Youth for enabling SDG4 & Innovations with Disadvantaged Children” is initiated with aim of ‘Enabling Innovations with Disadvantaged Children by Fostering Scientific Temper & Innovations Culture from a Young Age’. The idea is to make ‘Learning Science and (basic) Technology Fun’, promote ‘learning by doing’ with children and foster the culture of ‘innovations’ from an early age. Simple low cost to no cost science experiments were demonstrated and conducted by the children (including girls) and to promote ‘learning by doing’, ‘Science Kits’ were disseminated for use by children through Shikshan Ranjan Kendras.
5. A crucial factor being their role central not just for relief but as repository of scientific COVID-19 knowledge and for COVID-19 resilience building too.
6. Local women trained by AIILSG in livelihoods interventions went a long way in dismantling gender stereotypes.

Centre for Rural and Tribal Development and for Empowerment of Denotified and Nomadic Tribes

The centre developed a modus operandi for AIILSG’s efforts at the grassroots as well as supporting the local government efforts in various villages. These included:
1. “Gram Suraksha Day”: AIILSG’s trained Shikshan Mitras helped villagers to organize this special day to do sanitization, distribution of food material, establishing quarantine and isolation centre in the village for restricting movement of population.
2. Use of songs in local dialect: to create awareness about COVID-19, addressing vaccination hesitancy and to promote vaccination in community. In many project areas, the dialect of the tribes is different than the so-called mainstream dialect. Eg in 46 field action villages in AIILSG, the predominant understanding is through the local Bhil and Pawara dialects.
3. Enabled outreach of government agencies for COVID-19 tracking and vaccination, distribution of relief material by the government including food grains, sanitizers, soaps, school books etc.
4. Relief for 190 starving families from Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs): The DNTs are among the most marginalised in the world and India. AIILSG’s ICEQUI-T team has been making humble efforts for their empowerment. With traditional livelihoods dwindling very fast and having hardly any skills to survive in the modern world, food insecurity has been a key issue faced by the DNTs. Their hunger and starvation issues got seriously aggravated further during the COVID-19 induced lockdown. It was feared that the situation will have especially detrimental impact on the children from the DNTs. When the AIILSG ICEQUI-T team got to know about it, it took up the task of identifying the families in extreme poverty and need for food grain support in one of its field action areas: DNT settlements in Shirur Kasar taluka in Beed district. It provided relief to 190 DNT families 3 DNT settlements: Adarsh Nagar, Uttam Nagar and Ram Nagar.

Each of the 190 families were provided a packet of dry-food-ration sufficient for 15 days. , which included: Rice, Bajra/ Jawar, Tuar Dal- pigeon pea, Edible Oil, Spices, Chilli Powder and ground Turmeric.
As the task was extremely challenging considering the strict lockdown measures, the local government machinery was approached. The local government machinery responded very well and provided all necessary support. It is worthwhile to highlight and appreciate that the initiative was launched at the hands of Tehsildar, Shirur Kasar and Chief Executive officer, Shirur Kasar Nagar Panchayat.

International Centre for Differently Abled

An important set of disadvantaged neglected even now in COVID-19 context are the ‘differently abled’. The closure of blind girls’ schools had constrained dissemination of an innovation of AIILSG’s ICEQUI-T of Comprehensive Sexuality Education for blind girls and women. A need was identified for innovative, personalised dissemination tools for differently abled. This led to development of the Khushi Doll soft toy. It is designed by AIILSG team in such a way that an easily accessible and replaceable pen drive within the Khushi doll can be loaded with audio-message on wide range on developmental and health aspects, including COVID-19.
The AIILSG innovation of ‘Khushi’ doll has special significance as it will enable accessing information by the blinds girls and women who are not ‘braille literate’ and have no avenue for accessing scientifically correct information, further it will also help transcending socio-cultural taboo associated with imparting Sexual and Reproductive Health Education to all types of differently abled girls including blind girls.
AIILSG looks ahead to serve the cause better by reaching out to more and more differently abled through its foster-daughter- ‘Khushi’, which literally means ‘Happiness’.