Grameen Foundation India

Grameen Foundation India is a social organization with the mission to enable low-income communities, especially women, to create a world without poverty and hunger. Inspired by the work of Nobel Laureate Professor Mohammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank and a global leader in the fight against poverty, Grameen has impacted over one million low-income households to reach their full potential by providing access to essential financial services and information on agriculture and health for over thirteen years. Grameen works across the domains of innovations in digital finance, agriculture and livelihoods, women's economic empowerment, and health and nutrition. Grameen's pioneering contributions that create a differentiation in the social impact ecosystem include:

  • Inclusive Development: Working with the most vulnerable and low-income communities on enhancing their livelihoods & access to digital financial services, especially for women, smallholder farmers, and small and medium enterprises.
  • Data, evidence, and insight for impact – Grameen's work is rooted in research-generated insights, with strong evaluation and evidence backed decision making. Grameen built the Poverty Probability Index Tool for getting deep socio-economic insights and related problems, and other internal tools like the Grameen Vulnerability Index to map vulnerability of low-income communities beyond socio-economic parameters, CARE (Credit Assessment and Review of Enterprises) Index to benchmark investment readiness and business performance of women-owned small businesses, and the farmer producer organization diagnostic tool to track the performance of farmer producer companies in India.
  • Digital Platforms for Social Impact: Pioneered MIFOS, MOTECH, Grameen Mittra Connect app (Digital Financial Services platform), G-LEAP (learning platform), Grameen Kisan Connect (Agriculture platform for agri-input, agri-marketplace, and agri-advisory services).

Grameen aims to impact over 10 million households in the next five years through its work.

Purpose

Grameen's overarching theory of change is a standard framework, applied to its various programs across key thematic areas. It is based on three pillars – access to information, access to markets, products and services, and enhancing knowledge, skills, capabilities, and attitude. These three pillars in convergence will lead to behaviour change leading to the adoption of new products and services by low-income rural households, thereby enhancing economic status, health and nutrition status, and increasing resilience to withstand economic shocks, improving quality of life.

Grameen works under four programmatic domains:

  • Innovations in Digital Finance: Building curated and customized products and services promoting digital financial inclusion and financial resilience of low-income customers, and empowering the distribution networks of these digital financial services at the last mile.
  • Agriculture and Livelihoods: Increasing the net income of farmers, and increasing the participation of women in the agriculture ecosystem.
  • Women's Economic Empowerment: Women as equal – in rights, representation, opportunities, access and adoption, and outcomes. Moving from women being empowered, to women having power. The aim of the initiatives within this vertical are to overcome challenges and barriers that girls and women face that aggregate to create a cumulative disadvantage for women’s participation in the workforce and well-being.
  • Health and Nutrition: Strengthen demand-side and supply-side stakeholders, processes, and systems for improved maternal and child health. Key focus areas include capacity building of frontline health workers and last-mile healthcare-providing institutions, strategic stakeholder engagement with local communities and governance, community mobilization, addressing gender biases, and theme

Grameen is pushing towards mission-mode of outcome-focused social impact at scale – looking at a systems approach to solving wicked problems. Moving forward, Grameen aims to become a pioneer in steering community investments of corporates fulfilling their ESG commitments on outcomes aligning with Grameen’s mission, key outcomes, and focus areas.

Prabhat Labh

CEO, Grameen Foundation India

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