PRINCIPle areas

Community Mobilisation & Self-Help Group

NEED has always treated groups with a different attitude and this attitude has not been limited in treating them only as a medium of savings and credit but more importantly, as a larger cohesive group of peer members through which a very consistent and transparent engagement of these members are directly involved at every stage of the development strategy.

Self Help and Peer Groups have a very broad role, including:

Forum for organizing women
Mechanism for Saving and thrift habit
Means for Livelihood and micro-enterprise development
Path to greater political representation & power
A way forward to social cohesion and inclusion
Means to integrate with educational and economic literacy
Promoter of Health and Sanitation
Inventor of building environment awareness
Managing quality schools, information centers & other daily issues
Peer lending cum service driven Micro-Finance products
Bottom up globalization and advocacy for IPR & patenting the product from pro-poor perspective
Managing quality schools, information centers & other daily issues

Livelihood and Micro-Enterprises

NEED has set up the momentum through 43,000 micro-enterprises (mostly in the growing non-farm sectors) in a very sustainable manner generating a total direct and indirect employment of around 300,000.
NEED’s consistent endeavors in participatory Irrigation Management Training has led to Watershed Development to about 40,000 hectares, thereby augmenting the income of million of farmers in District Sultanpur.
Enhancing the economy of 18-20,000 people through organic way of developing Litchi orchards is yet another shade of achievement.
NEED always ensures economic inputs on the groups being taken into the mainstream of our team involvement so that the people living down to earth can experience the changing process in their day to day life.
Also very significant, the majority of these micro-enterprises are absolutely eco-friendly and conservation linked in nature and thereby create a sense of value chain, traditional wisdom and cultural texture to be preserved from sustainable economic development.
NEED is determined to commit millions & millions of livelihood and micro-enterprise with legal entity & wider market access towards achieving MDG (Millennium Dev. Goals).
Low capital cost in employment creation, especially in the fast-growing service sector.
The ability of the sector to draw “hidden” capital into the economy through the use of savings and family loans.
Conversance & linkages of organized people to the collaborates of organized sectors.

Community Driven Health Services & Primary Education

NEED identifies a deeper penetration of its endeavors over-viewing health standards among the rural communities that it strives to attain community driven services with sustenance covering a huge number of rural households in an integrated manner. These core areas are:

Jan Swashthya Base Line Survey (Community health base line survey),
Jan Swashthya Sambad (Community health communication),
Jan Swashthya Siksha Kendra (Community health education centre)
Jan Swashthya Poshan (Community health nutrition),
Jan Swashthya Learning Materials (Community health learning materials).

NEED had conducted a baseline survey prior to directing its interventions and after two years of targeted efforts, NEED has been successful in drastically reducing Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) and Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR) which has been evident in our data collection.

Through these core areas NEED team is capable to deliver an integrated health service down to the line benefiting a large number of rural and urban households by way of well-trained Women Village Health Guide Groups (VHGs), TBAs and Women Animators.

Community Driven Education

NEED imparts foremost concern to primary education apart from health awareness. Around 500 members of existing Woman’s Self Help Groups have been trained in a functional and organized manner to run their respective village schools. In addition, these woman members also manage remedial centres for adolescent girls in specific Science and English subjects. More than 4,000 children and 100 volunteer teachers have already been given educational inputs in an integrated manner and many of them have already enrolled in formal schools. The local Children Guardian Committee is also periodically monitoring the continuation and efficacy of their education. Some of the schools have grown self-sufficient in their functioning and no longer need the support of the NEED team.

Focused Capacity Building, Action Training & Networking

NEED depends on the enriched experiences, experiments, research and innovations of a diverse set of intense grassroots organizations and initiatives. NEED is focused on creating a climate of two way learning by way of a very focused, process-oriented, demonstrative and issue-based Capacity Building and Action Learning. The journey goes here in a collaborative spirit of learning, sharing, growing and excelling together. Such exercises based on facilitating each other in NEED takes place both at the local, national and international levels. It is here that like-minded networking from pro-poor perspectives takes place. Such organizations associated with NEED for the past several years across the globe are in huge numbers such as Financial Institutions, Civil Society Organization, Media Houses, International Organizations, Student Communities, Citizen groups, Senior Policy officials, farmers and producer groups, University and Academia Faculty and many statures of professionals and repute bodies.

Pro Poor Advocacy, Lobbying & Community
Driven Governance

NEED has been constantly striving through advocacy and lobbying for involvement of the poor and the deprived into the various aspects of policy formation and recurrent follow-up with focused interventions on domestic reforms. These endeavours include:

Reach-out symposiums at grassroots level involving farmers, rural producers, artisans, craftsmen, women groups and other stakeholders.
Organizing seminars for smooth functioning of WTO Cell to ensure effective penetration of WTO policies to the rural producers.
Explanation of WTO policies in Hindi for the use of rural producers groups.
Economic literacy with pro poor bottoms-up advocacy through an innovative national network called GRANITE (Grassroots Reach-out and Networking in Trade & Economics in India).
Advocacy with policy officials for the inclusion of the community that is impacted when policies are being formulated.
Protecting Pro Poor Intellectual Property Rights of tradition-rich crafts and products through registration under the Geographical Indicators Act, thereby creating a legal entity to enable market-driven access and identity.
Creation of a pool of marketing entrepreneurs from among the producer groups to strengthen their position in the market and prevent exploitation, thus building the disbursal of economic gains (generation of resourceful value addition to village economy) in the fast growing non-farm sector, especially in handicraft products.

Fair Trade

NEED being an active member of many international fair trade organizations such as IFAT, Netherlands, AFTF (Philippines), FTF India, FTI, FTF USA and many more has been always campaigning for fair practices in entrepreneurial and trade dealings. NEED teaches village producer groups to follow the fair trade approach through the medium of Exhibitions, Displays, and by being a part of Fair Trade Forums so that the value chain of social and economic advantage is preserved with their direct participation and ownership control and so their skill can be recognized both nationally and internationally. NEED also publicizes its eco-friendly products widely not only for their sale but also for their emulation. Therefore, NEED promotes the value of fair trade, its visibility, standards and practices from the grassroots to top.

Facilitating Horticulture Product for Export

NEED has undertaken extensive capacity building programmes of Litchi growers at Muzaffarpur with support from UNCTAD and in communication to and in consultation with the Agriculture Department of Bihar. Under the capacity building Programme, 4,500 growers have been provided training through workshops on various aspects of overall orchard management.

Nutrition Management
Irrigation Management
Canopy Management
Insecticide and Fungicide Management

Through intensive training workshops, the Litchi growers of Muzaffarpur have generated an unprecedented awakening for entrepreneurship ownership/drive. The workshops have been successful in installing a confidence among Litchi growers to weed out “Contractors” in the marketing of Litchi.

SHAKTI, The Brand name of Producer Products

Shakti means ‘inner strength’, and is the name given

to a unique collection of products, handcrafted by small groups of women artisans and tailors in Uttar Pradesh, Northern India. Traditional techniques and natural materials are blended with new design ideas to create beautiful, functional and eco-friendly products, whilst helping to generate sustainable livelihoods in one of the world’s poorest regions.

Global Learning (GLOBAL)

We also have penchant for Cross Learning Opportunities as we do not want to be left behind in the race of global concern for poverty eradication, fair trade and development. While we work as a catalyst for development, we do not deny the contribution of other level playing players and international agencies. For that reason, we work through the centre of Global Learning Opportunities Division (GLOBAL).

Global includes the following:

Promoting international volunteerism
The Inter-Cultural Exchange Experience
Focused Endeavors on Market Exploration for Business Products
Drawing strength of working together at Global Level
Training & Development
Information Sharing & Dissemination
Taking up collaborative global action project and ensuring its Global excellencies.
Widening the reach and spread of organizational experience including social entrepreneurship across the globe.