Our aims
The India Programme was established in 1994 to provide an opportunity for staff to get involved with our overseas work. Up to this point our response to the need overseas was through a donation programme, managed by the Swindon Overseas Committee. However, our experience in the UK showed us that we could have a bigger impact if we could get staff involved directly.
In India, we work through a series of Partner organisations. Our resources, both staff and money, are used to help our Partners improve the effectiveness of what they do. We recognise that Zurich staff don’t have community development expertise, so we concentrate on helping partners improve their organisations. And we’ve found that by helping to develop more efficient organisational structures, our partners are getting services to more people.
Over the years, our approach to achieving these improvements has evolved and we now have a robust process which manages the development of a partner from identification of suitable partners through to completion.
Working with our partners, we have created a series of indicators which show how well developed an organisation is. These indicators are used initially to help us identify suitable partners to add to the programme. Partners are then assessed annually and the results show us what areas we need to focus our resources on. And, by monitoring progress against these indicators, we can also see when it is right for a partner to leave the programme.
In a recent evaluation of how this approach was working, we estimate that our intervention directly helps to improve the reach of an organisation by around 10%.
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