TRI Change Model
Central to the process of “transformation”, leading to ensuring basic quality of life conditions in villages, is TRI’s founding belief that the initiative for and ownership of this change needs to come from the communities themselves. Through convergent societal action, it is possible to trigger a process of socialization, bringing about new normative behavior and creating fertile ground for rural communities to transform themselves.
STRATEGY
TRI’s strategy to transform villages into places of vibrant opportunities rests on four pillars:
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01
EMPOWERED COMMUNITIES
Creating platforms and building resilient, self-reliant communities capable of self-governance; of ensuring citizen engagement, responsibility and ownership in all community matters; and of influencing state institutions to realize the communities’ entitlements.
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02
MULTI-DIMENSIONAL INTERVENTIONS
Leveraging complementary competencies and linkages by creating a coalition of civil society actors, and bringing these to the communities.
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03
RESPONSIVE PUBLIC SYSTEM
Engaging with and creating a responsive public delivery system
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04
ENGAGED MARKET
Attracting market players to co-locate for providing goods and services, ensuring fair participation of rural households in large markets, and bringing investment flows into the rural economy
IMPACT PATHWAYS
- CONTEXT
- PROCESS
- RESULTS
- OUTCOMES
- IMPACT
CORE PRINCIPLES
- Being sensitive and responsive to ecological factors and environmental sustainability
- Addressing aspirations for upward spiral effect
- Supporting social normative behaviour change through collective action and by developing a critical mass of champions
- Introducing latest information to enhance skills and adopt new practices
- Creating ecosystems through partnerships and multi-sectoral engagement
ASSUMPTIONS
- The critical mass of champions developed within the nucleus will be willing to engage at secondary and tertiary levels.
- Saturating the cluster will lead to snowballing of the interventions at scale.
- Impacting knowledge, skills, perspectives and space within the collectives is necessary and sufficient for fostering normative behaviour change.
- Engagement in PRI and traditional panchayat (for access) – governance and change in social normative behaviours
- Progress indicators will change rapidly.
- The state and other actors will make investments concurrently, to create necessary conditions—skills, basic infrastructure and other services.
- The enhanced rate of change will facilitate alleviating the lifetime opportunity differential.
Health & Nutrition
Community efforts can make a significant impact on indicators which require a health seeking behavior; coupled with service delivery which can be handled by frontline workers of the public health system. Community efforts around issues requiring complex medical services around diagnostics and significant curative support may be severely constrained by availability of such services. Thus, the area which a community led effort can significantly impact is on issues which can be addressed by joint initiative of the community institutions and frontline workers
– ANM, ASHA Worker, anganwadi worker.
KEY AREAS OF FOCUS
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01
RCH
Complete ANCs, HRP detection, institutional deliveries, PNCs, Full-Immunization of children, Adoption of IYCF practices, Mineral & Vitamin supplements, etc.
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02
Nutrition
Food diversity and linking agriculture, dealing with underlying issues of gender (for example, intra-family food distribution, early marriage, early pregnancy, leading to low birth-weight babies)
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03
Communicable / Endemic diseases
Preventive community led efforts to adopt best practices to deal with 1–2 key epidemic diseases in the local area.
This is attended by:
- Incubating community-centred processes of self-action and social accountability
- Developing innovative solutions, using public and private sectors, to improve the reach coverage and quality of essential primary health and nutrition services
Repeated action-reflection cycles in community collectives lead to experimentation of new behaviour, and facilitates the process of questioning age-old beliefs around health and nutrition practices. These processes help communities connect with the public systems by way of (i) creating demand for health/nutrition related services, and (ii) engaging to improve quality in the social accountability/citizenship frame. Thus, the role of the ‘change vector’ from within the community, who triggers and sustains the processes, in the primary groups is key.
ROLE OF PARTNERS
State Government
- Increasing the availability of physical infrastructure, equipment, human resources, technical support, commodities and supplies for provision of health and nutrition services to reduce gaps vis-a-vis National Health Mission (NHM) specifications.
- Ensuring cooperation and participation of related supervisory and frontline workers.
Thematic Resource Organization
- Building perspective, knowledge and skills of community collectives and embedded ‘change vectors’
- Identifying gaps in knowledge and skills of frontline workers, and building capacity, as required
Education
TRI’s focus is primary schools. Communities have maximum space to improve this segment; it is foundational to future learning and knowledge opportunities. The SDG Goal 4, Target 4.1, Indicators 33 (primary completion rates) and 34 (learning outcomes) capture the intent appropriately.
OUR BROAD STRATEGY IS CENTERED AROUND
- Bridging community-school/community-teacher disconnect. Building a purpose for the teacher and a mechanism for her/him to take ownership of the sense of belonging to the school and the children.
- Enhancing the classroom experience of child
- Measuring results and continuously assessing a child’s learning
This will require a new mode of engagement with the community and fostering by the frontline NGO and the resource NGOs. Beginning with building the communities’ perspective on education, an appreciation of the role of the school and the children in shaping a child’s life mechanism for ongoing engagement with school needs be generated. Frontline NGOs mobilize the community and open the space for education-focused conversations. The Resource Organization has the primary responsibility of working with the teachers and the school education system, to strengthen the learning experience of the child.
ROLE OF PARTNERS
Frontline NGOs
- Mobilizing community and supporting engagement with community-centred processes such as engagement with the school Management Committee (SMC), community ownership of the local school and bridging teacher-community disconnect
Thematic Resource Organization
- Supporting engagement with teachers, students and the local education system through context-specific training modules, toolkits (audio-visuals), etc., to improve in-class and outside learning environment
- Working with public systems to plug gaps in the capacity of teachers, and grounding SMCs
State Government
- Providing the relevant support as per sanctioned government plans and opening space for engagement by resource organizations
OUTCOMES
- Enrolment at the primary level 100%
- Retention
- Better classroom processes
- Learning indicators developed by internal group will be used to assess students’ learning achievements
- Active, empowered community with strong linkages to schools
- Functional anganwadi centres
Field engagement focuses on contextual, collective-led processes, to trigger personal responsibility for change, and public and market systems, to support the process leading to adoption of alternative practices. This can happen when personal dimensions such as aspirations, self-belief, sense of agency are triggered, and each person is provided with an eco-system that supports fulfilment of these aspirations.
However, not all the problems that women and their communities face can be solved by the community itself. An analysis of
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01
what communities can do on their own
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02
what they can do with a little external support
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03
what they cannot do
is critical to design action strategies.
The key strategies to deal with issues in the first two points are predominantly community led individual and collective action processes whereas the last point needs the engagement of public systems and market mechanisms.
ACTION FRAMEWORK
The G-NGO, supported by its thematic partners, also works with local government systems to strengthen the interface between the collectives, the Panchayati Raj Institutions and last-mile functionaries of the government. The G-NGO will also make efforts to link the community collectives with appropriate markets, for inputs, outputs and required services around livelihoods and other basic needs.
Summary of the Action Strategy:
| Domains | Key Processes | Actors Responsible | Expected Intermediate outcomes |
|---|---|---|---|
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Trigger aspiration and personal responsibility |
Action reflection processes |
G-NGO in close engagement |
Community has a long-term vision for change, Women stepping out of household work, to engage in wider community issues and adopting contemporary practices |
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Develop perspectives and knowledge |
Develop a cadre of Change Vectors; Institutionalize perspective development/ knowledge inputs followed by reflection processes |
Thematic Partners working closely with G-NGO and the Federation |
Broad-based leadership of Federations with a very large number of trained women engaged in perspective building and providing knowledge inputs on a regular basis |
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Strengthen community-public systems interface |
Activating existing mandated interface bodies and governance structures of PRIs |
G-NGO in close engagement with the Federation |
Activate key mandated spaces, with strong participation of the community and of public servants |
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Upstream engagement to decongest public systems |
Formal agreement (MoU) with the state, to support the grass-roots demand system |
TRI supported by thematic partners |
Relevant formal arrangement, mentioned in the MoU, activated on the ground in the action blocks |
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Attract and curate engagement of social enterprises and businesses |
Attract SocEnts / businesses around missing services addressing both: ‘community as producers’ and ‘community as consumers’ |
TRI (creating governance and operational mechanisms with G-NGO and Federations for local alignment) |
Two or three enterprises engaged in critical issues of a specific block |