Women's Empowerment
Overview
Women's Bank
Business Schools
Chambers of Commerce
Mann Deshi Mahotsav
Community Radio
Kickstart Girls
Community Empowerment
Overview
Water Conservation
Mann Deshi Champions
Bicycles For Girls
Farm to Market
Healthcare for all
Soil Testing
Championing Green
People
Donate
STORIES OF CHANGE
MEDIA & RESOURCES
FINANCIALS
In 2012, the Mann region experienced a crippling drought. Kerabai Sagar, an old customer of Maan Deshi Bank approached the bank to mortgage her gold. “You might loan me the money to buy fodder for my animals but how can I buy water? Who will you work with if we all are forced to migrate to cities?” she remarked. Mann Deshi set up a cattle camp. It lasted over one-and-half years and 14,000 animals and 4,000 families lived in shacks in the scorching heat.
Our Community Programme was born. Today, our programme has expanded and we work with farming communities to create localized and sustainable livelihood solutions. We hope to scale by sharing these lessons learned and best practices through partnerships with organizations across India.
30,000 people
have benefited from access to clean water.
2x increase
in farmers’ incomes because of additional cash crops planted and new businesses such as animal husbandry and fisheries developed.
1,300 hectares
of land have been irrigated.
Reduced migration away from villages.
Women of the communities spend less time finding and transporting water.
Farmers have held on to their main assets - livestock.
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7,000 athletes
inducted into the programme.
300 athletes
competed in district, state, national and international level competitions.
In 2011, one of our athletes Sarita Bhise ran the 800 meter at a local event and won. At that time, she didn’t own a pair of decent shoes. Today she is the captain of Maharashtra’s Under-17 team for field hockey. It is an enormous achievement because she belongs to the local nomadic shepherd community and becoming the captain of field hockey team means she is now the primary breadwinner of her family. She is now a role model for all the children here.”
Prabhat Sinha, Founder Mann Deshi Champions Programme
Mann Deshi champions youth development center is golden opportunity for girls. Mann Deshi has started career development program for girls of rural Maharashtra. Program provides training for self - defense, personality development, story telling, learning English, driving, interview skills.
Along with physical training and exam training Mann Deshi provideds free library, shoes, sports kits , every day Nutritional and healthy food is given. The objective is to help rural girls to get themselves at the next level of personal and professional development. The program is supported by Rythm Foundation.
This programme, supported by IndusInd Bank, nurtures young high potential athletes - particularly young women athletes - who are economically disadvantaged. They are given training, nutritional support, life-skills workshops and scholarships.
We have excellent facilities at our headquarters in Mhaswad and also use the facilities at the Sanas ground, the Nasik Government Sports School and the Balewadi Sports School. Our athletes participate in a number of sports such as track and field, wrestling, badminton, field hockey and swimming and we work on building their personal fitness regimes as well as their confidence.
We also regularly invite guest coaches and highly accomplished national and international athletes to meet and interact with our athletes, as well take our athletes on field trips and encourage them to share their stories on the Mann Deshi Community Radio, which has over 50,000 regular listeners. Most of our athletes end up playing at the national level.
Prajakta Shinde is from Dahiwadi village. She is a daughter of single mother. Prajakta comes from an underprivilaged community, for her there would be no other option than getting employed. At Mann Deshi's Youth Development Center Prajakta developed skill set for stage daring, improved her English and understood methods of giving an Interview. Today Prajakta proudly says that she has secured a job at Tata Consultancy in Pune. While speaking at the Mann Deshi Tarang Radio she said, she had never imagined that she would land a job at the place like Tata Consultancy.
Access to education empowers girls to break free from the clutches of early marriage and a life of dependency. This initiative dates back to 2002 when Mann Deshi Foundation started distributing bicycles to young girls with the aim of preventing them from dropping out of school and ensuring continued access to educational institutions. The main aim has also been to improve safety and mobility for young girls, reduce their dependence on adults to take them to school, promote sustainable alternatives and reduce travel time, so that they could focus fully on learning and other school activities. Mann Deshi aims to empower these girls with Freedom on Wheels’.
Boost self confidence in adolescent girls and young women from marginalized and vulnerable communities
Help them become financially literate and money confident to pursue their personal and professional goals
Make banking services more accessible to the youth
To promote skill development opportunities among adolescent girls and young women
Develop soft skills necessary to become job ready
Stop child marriages and prevent early marriages
To reduce the dropout rate of school going girls
Make young women conscious, aware and engaged through workshops on various social, economic and civic issues
Remove distance and dependency as an obstacle to access education
Save time on daily commute to schools and for other activities
To make boys and young men allies in women empowerment
Give adolescent girls and young women a platform to showcase their talents and opinions
9,000 bicycles
have been donated since 2002.
150 bicycles
on average are donated to school girls each year.
"I remember the case of a student whose father was too poor to buy her a bicycle and because her home was so far from our school, he wanted her to drop out. But because of the Mann Deshi bicycle she was able to continue. She's now pursuing a medical degree."
Chanda Mane, Principal, Gyan Vardhini High School
1,200 Farmers
from 40 villages have been mobilized to work together to achieve fare pricing.
First sale of 1,700 tons
of farm produce successfully facilitated.
Our first woman-led Farmer Producer Company
was set up with our help in Dec 2018 that aggregated smallholder farmers and facilitating access to inputs, markets, capital & technology.
We have constructed a state-of-the-art Diagnostic Center which provides radiology and pathology services. This is one-of-a-kind within a 70km radius that charges government rates.This center serves 400,000 people living in Mann and Khatav Tehsil's.
The Gondawale Khurd Rural Hospital in Satara is led by Mann Deshi, supported by our corporate partners HSBC India and Cipla Foundation, in collaboration with the district administration of Satara.This partnership was begun to help stifle the devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic whilst also undertaking research to assess the needs of the communities and cater accordingly to those needs.
We have established regular health camps for women and their communities. These started in 2019, during the Covid-19 pandemic, when we realized that non communicable diseases are happening all around us and impacting numerous people. While rates of diabetes and hypertension are high, there are very few people in rural India who know they have these conditions.
At these health camps we carry out health screenings, for diabetes and hypertension. For children we also screen for vision. These healthcamps are aimed at preventative healthcare practices.
We are working to empower women to provide doorstep healthcare services, in partnership with Dvara Healthcare Finance. In this program we recruit women and train them to carry out doorstep healthcare services.
In partnership with GeorgeTown University’s MedStar Hospital and Dvara Health Finance we are working to develop a curriculum to train community healthcare workers that will be shared with the government in the future.
A study of 179 households in rural Satara conducted by Mann Deshi and analyzed by Dvara Health Finance shows households spend a quarter of their monthly income on healthcare. In response to these findings we have started a unique pilot program in partnership with Dvara. At present we have the following components under the NEEM project:
Over 8,000 recovered in the public private partnership hospital..
Over 50,000 women screened at health camps.
Over 200 crores saved in healthcare costs.
Successfully Set-up the first of its kind Agriculture and Soil Testing Lab
We have successfully set-up an Agriculture and Soil Testing Lab. It is fully equipped with a chemical lab and a crop pathology centre. We aim to provide services to over 20,000 farmers per year
2023 has been named ‘International Year of Millets’. This is because millets; are resilient to climate change, have a low carbon and water footprint, are less expensive and nutritionally superior and can provide nutritional security and they act as a shield against nutritional deficiencies.
Mann Deshi is working to create a value chain for millets, encouraging farmers to grow this crop which is good for the planet and good for them. This is one part of Mann Deshi’s efforts to tackle climate change while also improving the financial stability and livelihood of marginalized farmers.
The cold storage facility was built to prevent farmers falling victim to volatile prices in the market, enabling them to store their produce when prices are low and sell it later when the price returns to a higher level. It keeps produce fresh, prevents food wastage and enables farmers to earn a better income.
It is essential to farmers’ livelihoods, however it requires a significant amount of electricity to run and therefore has a negative impact on the environment. For this reason we have sought out funding to cover the cost of installing solar panels for this facility, enabling us to combat climate change without compromising farmers’ livelihoods.
Mann Deshi undertakes tree planting and rewilding initiatives. The environmental benefits include; a reduction in greenhouse gasses in the environment, increased levels of oxygen in the air, improved biodiversity, a return of endangered species, a reduction in soil erosion and improved ground water retention.
We are involving our women farmers in these projects, and educating them on the various benefits for the environment as a whole and them as individual farmers. We are seeing these farmers undertaking tree planting initiatives on their own land, enabling them to combat climate change and benefit from improved crop yields and decreased input costs at the same time (through a reduction in soil erosion, improved ground water retention and improved biodiversity).
Through the Agriculture and Soil testing Lab we are nudging farmers towards more sustainable farming practices, by advising women farmers on how to build healthy soils that sequester more carbon, have a higher water holding capacity and reduce the need for carbon-intensive fertilizers. Through adopting these farming practices, we are helping them to improve their crop yield without compromising the environment. Our goal is to support farmers and encourage them to adopt 100% organic farming.
We are encouraging our women farmers to take climate action into their own hands, and become “Climate Change Warriors”.
Farmers in rural India are facing an increasing number of challenges as a result of climate change.
More extreme and irregular weather patterns are leading to farmers getting low yields and poor quality crops. The result is that it is becoming increasingly difficult for farmers to earn a stable income.
