Adoptee - Case Studies
Bridging the Urban-Rural Divide
by Team Byrraju
Introduction by Sandra
Working in 199 villages and making an enormous difference at grass roots level to millions of lives Adopt a Business is thrilled to have the Byrraju Foundation as a new partner. Based in Hyderabad, the Byrraju Foundation has been working in the area of rural transformation since 2001. Its mission is "To create a world-class platform for holistic and sustainable rural transformation". It does this using a range of delivery modules, including education, health, women's empowerment, livelihoods, water & sanitation, agriculture and community leadership and applies them according to the needs of each village. Particularly inspiring is the way in which Byrraju strives to ensure that the transformation and changes are owned, managed and led by the rural communities themselves.
Earlier this year the Byrraju Foundation completed their first AAB assignment with Rob Sedman from IBM. Rob spent four weeks working with their GramIt programme, a rural Business Processing Outsourcing initiative. Its aim is to train rural youth in IT, office and language skills to enable them to create incomes for themselves while providing outsourcing services from the villages. Rob helped them look at how they could best market their services and worked with them to develop a business strategy for moving forward. During October a second assignment will be taking place. Simon Butler, from Ernst & Young, will be helping Byrraju develop a Rural Transformation Index, which should help them measure the effectiveness of their programmes over time. In a future article we'll feature more about the impact of these assignments but in the meantime what follows is a brief synopsis of the Foundation's work from the Byrraju team.
Bridging the Urban-Rural Divide by Team Byrraju
One of the foremost not-for-profit organizations in the country, Byrraju Foundation is committed to transforming the quality of life of the rural underprivileged. The Foundation seeks to build progressive and self-reliant rural communities, adopting a holistic approach. The aim is to transform people's lives by extending them basic services like Healthcare, Sanitation, safe drinking water, Primary Education, Adult Literacy and training in Livelihood skills for both men and women. The use of technology and constant innovation are our chief differentiators. The Foundation is currently working in 199 villages across six districts of Andhra Pradesh, India, impacting 3 million rural lives.
The core values governing the mission are involving community and making things happen by applying knowledge. While we deliver services through a physical presence in each of our villages, we believe that rural transformation can be sustained only if the transformation process is disaggregated and the processes are institutionalised. Our processes innovatively combine global best practices, effective management systems and state-of-the-art technology. The processes are ultimately owned, managed and led by the rural communities themselves.
The Foundation embraces Six Sigma as the tool for designing new processes and making breakthrough improvements in the existing processes. Information and Communication Technology, apart from collaboration with national and international facilitating agencies, is harnessed to generate desirable and enduring changes in all facets of rural life in the shortest possible time.
Awards and certifications
During our short existence (the Byrraju Foundation was founded in 2001), we have received many national and international awards. Listed below are some of the major awards and certificates we received in recognition of our efforts to transform rural areas:
- Computerworld Honors
- Tech Laureate Award for Tele Medicine
- Global Development Network Award
- eINDIA's Best NGO initiative of the year Award for Ashwini
- ASIA CSR Award for Rural BPO
- World Bank prize for innovative virtual project
- HYSEA award for the best CSR initiative
- IBM award for the most innovative rural education program
- I.Bhimavaram School selected as the Best School in the State
- 10 adopted villages received "Nirmal Gram Puraskar" for best
sanitation practices - Best NGO Water Initiative Award - By Water Digest - UNESCO
- Winner of First Applied Innovation Forbes Award for GramIT
- FICCI and TERI Awards for Best CSR programs
The Foundation believes that cooperation, collaboration, alliance, partnership, etc. are the concepts that rule the world where specialisation is the by-word. No organisation can achieve its goal in isolation in such a scenario. Alliances offer an opportunity to produce better value for the stakeholders through the synergic energy generated by the participants' respective strengths. Therefore, organisations join hands to reap the synergic value such association creates.
Further, alliances help bridge strategic gaps, if any, in an organisation; and so are very useful. More so in the case of non-profit organisations, which have to look for ways to do "more with less" using the available resources. Alliances provide NGOs an economical avenue to be effective in their endeavours. They can leverage respective competencies to pursue collaborative missions. We at Byrraju Foundation do recognise the importance of Alliances & Partnerships. To date, we have allied with 175 organisations; from both the public and private domain.
The larger purpose of entering such relationships is of course to convert the Foundation's work into a movement.
A snapshot of Foundation achievements
- 6 million patient visits to the Village Health Centers
- 80,000 Individual Sanitary Latrines (ISLs) constructed
- 5000 unemployed youth trained and placed
- 10000 people given livelihood skills training
- 57 pure drinking water plants set up
- 150 adopted villages have achieved 100% literacy
- 101 IBM KidSmart Centers set up in rural primary schools
- 120 active alliance partnerships
- 100 active virtual leaders
Verghese K Jacob
Chief Integrator and Lead Partner
verghase@byrrajufoundation.org
Byrraju Foundation
Satyam Enclave, 2-74, Jeedimetla Village NH-7
Hyderabad- 500 055, AP, India
Phone: +91 40 23191725, 23193881/82
Fax: +91 40 23191726
Website
www.byrrajufoundation.org