DSAOFNEAWTIAOTNERS / Social responsibility 2160 From left: Mr. Lenka, Area Junior Manager - Gajapati District (Gram Vikas), Umakanth Nayak, Coordinator - Koinpur Project (Gram Vikas), Divya Kapoor, Executive (Sunlit Future), Aushtosh Bhatt, Coordinator - Renewable Energy Projects (Gram Vikas), Pia Rask, Donations Specialist (Poul Due Jensen Foundation), Om, Project Manager for Orissa Sites (Sunlit Future) LEARNING AND IMPROVING TOGETHER In complex projects with many different partners, coordination and clear division of responsibility becomes the key to ensuring smooth execution and the desired results. This has become very clear from our ambitious programme, ’100 pumps for 100 villages’, where our India-based partner, Sunlit Future, has worked with several other NGOs and sponsors to bring safe water to rural communities. In most safe water projects a development NGO will buy in a technical solution through a subcontractor, but in India, we’ve turned the relationship upside down. Our partner, Sunlit Future, is essentially a technology provider that specialises in building solar solutions. They are based in Auroville, an international township in the Villipuram district of Tamil Nadu in Southeast India. The challenges of making these projects work at the community level are as different as the countries and regions we work in. Add in the additional challenge of communicating in the thousands of local dialects across India, and you can see that communication with a community is not always straightforward. That is why it is important for us to work with partners that are experienced in their field and know the context they are working in really well. Each organisation is specialised Sunlit Future was conscious from the beginning that community development and sanitation and hygiene training were not one of their core services. So the logical thing to do was to find local partners who could add those skills to solve the equation. One such local partner is Gram Vikas, whose major operations in India are in 25 districts of the state of Odisha. Gram Vikas means “Village Development”. Gram Vikas’ approach to water and sanitation is through first building solid partnerships with the villages, insisting on gender equality and the entire com-
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