Course Facilitators: Siva Muthuprakash, Sanjiv Phansalkar, Jayapadma

Background

There has been increasing acceptance of mainstream development stakeholders that are focusing only on financial benefits will not lead us to sustainable development. While the scope of including social and ecological aspects has expanded, often the qualitative nature of social and ecological benefits limits their impact in policy discourse. More and more tools are being developed to measure the social and ecological impacts in numbers that are accepted by various stakeholder groups. Social Return on investment (SROI) is one such approach which has been started in the context of social enterprise and gaining wider acceptance by corporates as it speaks in term of Return on Investment (ROI). With the CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) activities gaining momentum over the last few years, SROI is being seen as a potential alternative tool to measure the benefits of an investment in any development project with a holistic and participatory approach. Thus, SROI is becoming an essential tool to be learnt by the development practitioners for better planning, implementation and monitoring of projects.

Course Objectives

• To introduce various methods of evaluating investments and the concepts of SROI.
• To familiarise the participants in SROI techniques, which will help them evaluate social and ecological benefits along with financial returns from the project investment.

Participant Profile:

Project managers, coordinators and researchers in the development sector

Course Contents:

• Overview of CSR India
• Evaluating investments: Conventional methods
• Principles of SROI: History, Core Concept and Approach
• Application of SROI: Protocols, Tools and Techniques
• Casework based on live projects

Pedagogy:

Seminars, classroom discussion and group activities

• Group exercise- building & using evidence

Course Facilitator: Prof.Ajit Kanitkar

Background

The last decade has seen voluminous research publications in the field of Social Enterprises and Social Entrepreneurs (SEs and SE-ENTs) probably only next to the topic of climate change. The field of SE draws its principles and concepts from diverse yet intertwined fields of economics, psychology, business management, innovation, start-ups, small and medium enterprises, strategy, rural development, philanthropy, moral sciences, finance and law to name a few. The Indian ecosystem has become dynamic in the last ten years with activities of a diverse set of stakeholders in the ecosystem.

Regarding sectors, there is a multitude of activities virtually in all sectors encompassing education, health, nutrition, livelihood, skilling, education, urban sanitation, water, energy and other fields. Many organisations are now scouting emerging SEs by offering awards, start-up grants and challenge fund to the aspiring S-ENTs in many parts of the country. In addition to practitioners, considerable activities are happening in established educational institutions of higher learning such as IITs and IIMs, regional engineering colleges and other educational institutions. These institutions are offering specialised courses and elective modules on SEs, are opening up their space for incubating new SEs and leading research programmes.

VAF has undertaken year-long research focusing on SEs in Agriculture. The purpose of the training programme is to offer the knowledge and insights generated in this research to a wide range of stakeholders.

Course objectives:

The training module will provide an overview of both the theoretical and practical challenges in promoting, incubating and managing of Social Enterprises. This programme will build on the recent publications of VAF covering 16 case studies in Agriculture.

Participant’s profile: The programme is for senior management and persons heading Social enterprise activities in support institutions, Donors, Government and CSR departments, research and training institutions, investors, mentoring and evaluations specialists etc.

The programme is NOT designed for social entrepreneurs but for those entrusted with the responsibility of promoting Social enterprises and strengthening the ecosystem. A separate programme of three days duration, for the existing and prospective social entrepreneurs, will be offered.

Course content:

• Understanding the theory and practice of Social enterprises
• Challenges in the India agriculture sector
• SE in the context of Agriculture
• Identifying social cause and choice of a Business model
• Management challenges for mobilising resources
• Assessing the impact
• Challenges for SE promotion and incubation and strengthening the ecosystem
• Knowledge management and SEs

Pedagogy: Lectures, classroom discussions using case studies and interactions with social entrepreneurs

Course Facilitators: Prof.Sanjiv Phansalkar, Prof.Ajit Kanitkar

Background

Collective Action has largely been seen as an emancipatory tool for poverty amelioration. Women’s collective organisations (WC for short) take many forms: SHGs, “Mahila mandals”, co-operatives for undertaking or supporting an economic activity; Nari Sangh etc. These WC are floated by promoting organisations (PO). They may have the form of a registered entity or remain an informal association of women members. These may be unitary or Federal. The objectives of these collectives also vary: savings and credit; joint or group economic enterprises, pooled marketing; acting as a local pressure group for getting entitlements; advocating for gender justice; countering gender-based oppression and violence; facilitating literacy etc. The nature of these goods varies straddles across all the four types: private, common, toll and public. Thus, some of these WC produce and strengthen private goods; some produce and strengthen common goods and others produce public goods. With more than a lakh federation operational in the rural areas, the sustainability of these collectives is a major challenge faced by the promoting organisations.

Course Objectives:

This program aims at creating pathways for making these women collectives sustainable.

Course Content

The program would be divided into four modules.

• issues pertaining to the collective action
• management and governance of collective institutions
• external engagement and macro-perspectives
• issues of kinship networks, leadership, and engendering collectives.

Participant Profile

The program is ideal for practitioners in NGOs working with women collectives. The total duration of the program is two days.

Pedagogy

The program would be a mix of classroom discussion, group exercises and case discussions.

Course Facilitator: Prof.Sanjiv Phansalkar

Background

Local area Economy Analysis refers to the practice of systematically understanding both the current pattern of economic activities as well as the economic potential of the local area. The analysis serves to identify activities which can be undertaken by the target rural poor to enhance their incomes. It can further provide leads to the intervener to classify possible activities and options in operational categories with implications for the nature of engagement and investment therein.

Course objectives:

The training module will explain the purpose and utility of carrying out a systematic exercise of local area economy analysis. It will also build skills for conducting this analysis through practical experience. It will create an appreciation of how such an exercise can help build livelihoods programs in a chosen cluster of villages.

Course contents:

• Understanding the local area economy
• The game of leaky bucket
• Pros and cons of promoting the local area economy
• Understanding resource potential
• Understanding the current consumption
• Understanding flows of commodities into and from the local area
• Making sense of the world: Ways to collect data and to present it
• Field Exercise for conducting the analysis
• Identifying unused potential
• Summing up the analysis of LAE and generating prima facie options
• Building a livelihoods program based on LAE

Participant profile:

Target: persons charged with livelihoods promotion in a cluster of villages. For example, Project Officers and District Managers in NRLM projects, CFT Leads etc.

Course Facilitator: Dr Abhijeet Jadhav

Background

The occurrence of disasters affecting human habitat is increasing. Middle- and low-income countries face a higher number of affected people as well as higher compromise on basic human rights, mainly due to less investment in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and preparedness. After a large-scale disaster, more helping hands are required, and often many NGOs get sucked in the humanitarian work. At times NGOs want to cater to some familiar domain of work. However, working in disasters is often challenging and different than usual work even if the activity-domain is same. This training module specifically orients NGOs working in the public health domain for engaging in post-disaster humanitarian action.

Course Objectives

• To get familiar with the technical aspects of disaster response
• To understand the structure of disaster response in India
• To get familiar with various post-disaster public health challenges
• To get familiar with the process of building post-disaster health interventions

Course Content

• Nomenclature, definitions & classifications
• Indian system of disaster response
• Major activities pre & post-disaster
• Public health and disasters
• Short term public health interventions
• Group exercise
• Sectoral health interventions
• Group exercise
• Mitigation & Rehabilitation

Participant profile: For NGOs/ civic bodies/ self-help groups/ unions

Pedagogy:

Course Facilitator: Archana Chandola

Background

VAF as per its vision wants to work in the rural domain and wants to raise questions and attempt to find answers to the questions which impact a large population either through their livelihood options, engagement with stakeholders at the village level, changing agricultural needs, health requirements, changing aspirations etc. In line with the above vision, while VAF works independently to conduct research, it is also imperative to partner with organizations which have similar goals and are working at the grassroots level. This exercise of providing programmes in the form of executive training will help in extending the impact of VAF, expedite the change VAF aspires and in the process of doing so, will enhance institutional learning.

VAF Staff has expertise in programme implementation, monitoring, assessments and evaluations.

Course Objectives

To build capacities of grassroots organisations in the areas of monitoring, evaluation and research

Course Contents:

The course will cover two modules

Module 1: Monitoring Strategy:

• What does ‘monitoring’ mean
• How are monitoring and implementation related: theoretically and practically
• Objectives of monitoring
• What to do after collecting data from monitoring exercises
• Monitoring in large- and small-scale systems
• Trade-off: efficiency vs cost, optimising efficiency and capacity, short term vs long term changes
• Requirements of the funding agency

Module 2: Conducting Research Studies

• Components of conducting studies
  1. Process flow: design, data collection, analysis
  2. Sampling
• Data Collection
  1. Types of data collection: quantitative vs qualitative
  2. Dos and Don’ts of conducting data collection
  3. Demo of data collection

Participant profile: For NGOs/ civic bodies/ self-help groups/ unions

Course Facilitators: Siva Muthuprakash, Shashank Deora

Background

Policies and interventions are helpful but rarely delivers holistic development, because real-life systems are complex, dynamic, nonlinear, feedback driven and often change-resistant. Often the interventions focusing on individual processes and causality of developmental problems fails to improve the situation and sometime aggravate the problem further.  It is essential to conceptualise the problems systemically to design any policy or a program in a holistic way that would reduce the risk of failure and aggravations. Further, the indicators selected to measure the impact often have an overemphasis on short-term benefits discounting the sustainability aspects of the system. The concepts of systems thinking and dynamics will aid the development practitioners to avoid these shortfalls and design their programs and monitoring system holistically and sustainably.

Course Objectives

• To familiarise the participants to various concepts in systems thinking and modelling.
• To give practice on conceptualising complex realities using casual-networks and visualise development scenarios in the long term using system dynamics.
• To equip the participants to holistically design their programs and identify appropriate indicators to measure their impact

Participant Profile:

Project managers, coordinators and researchers in the development sector

Course Contents:

• Introduction to systems thinking
• Causal Loop Diagrams and feedbacks
• Concept of Stock and Flow
• Delays and Multi-dimensionality
• System dynamics and equilibrium
• Tools for system thinking and modelling
• A systems framework for indicators
• Systems thinking for project design and monitoring
• Participatory modelling

Pedagogy:

Seminars, classroom discussion, group activities and practice in system modelling

Course Facilitators: Sanjiv Phansalkar, Ajit Kanitkar

Participant Profile: Project implementation staff interested in learning how to identify and write case studies/ stories from the field