Swami Vivekanand Shiksha Samiti

Since the foundation SVSS involves in various project where Terre des Homes, Bread for World, Misereor, UNICEF, State Welfare Board, UPVHA, SIFPSA, CRS, Ministry of Labour, Ministry of Environment, International Labour Organization, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan are SVSS’s esteemed partners.

Women Empowerment Project: UNDP- IKEA:

The project is implemented with the objective of building capacity of SHGs and other key stakeholders to ensure social, economic and political empowerment of the community at large. The intervention area of this project is 50 villages in the city block of Mirzapur district. Strategies adopted for achieving the objective in this intervention have been formation and strengthening self help groups, leadership skill development of women and awareness generation on political processes. Through these strategies the project ensures social economic and political empowerment of the community and especially women in the project villages. It stresses on the capacity of women in the areas of entrepreneurship skill and functional literacy. The project also promotes women taking active part in PRIs. Advocacy effort to disseminate learning has also been taken up as a strategy to disseminate the learning and achievements to have a larger impact of the project processes.

Uttar Pradesh Participatory Forest Management and Poverty Alleviation Project (UP-PFPAP):

This project is funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). The project has been formulated to restore degraded forests, to augment forest resources and to improve livelihood options and empower the local people who are dependant on forests by promoting sustainable improving environment and poverty alleviation.

The main focus of this project is on consolidation of Joint Forest Management (JFM)/ Eco –development through augmenting forest productivity and linking forests with alternative livelihood and employment generation. In this project SVSS have been involved as a Partner NGOs to implement the field activities. Key activities in this project are:

Organizing the community and promoting community level micro planning
Enhancing the organizational capacity of JFMC/ EDC/ SHGs, helping them in record keeping, problem solving and financial management
Community development and livelihood security improvement
Facilitating development of micro entrepreneurship development and promoting income generating activities through SHG formation

This project is being implemented in three blocks of Mirzapur district namely Paehara, Rajgarh and Lalgang.

Strengthening Education, Health and Livelihood (SEHL):

The present project SEHL is the logical consequence of the past project Child Labour Free Villages (CLFV) a three years project (which has wind up in July 08) was initiated as a third and final phase of Integrated Rehabilitation of Child Labour (REHA Programme). While the REHA project helped mobilize community and created a critical momentum that could lead to invigoration of institutions such as VEC, much was yet to be done for improving lives of children in a sustainable manner and hence, the necessity of SEHL. Covering 10 villages in remote parts of Mirzapur districts, SEHL targets school-going children (06-14 years), adolescent girls (12-18 years), parents and community in general. Strengthening schemes that are especially designed for improving the education and health status of children such as NRHM and ICDS is an integral component of SEHL. The project also focuses on NREGA, micro-credit and other development programs of the government. The underlying assumption is that unless the livelihood situation of community significantly improves, efforts in the sphere of health and education with not yield a sustainable impact. Formal community based organization is an important part of the program strategy.

Rural Crèche Programme:

SVSS partnered with State welfare board, Community and Panchayat to establish crèches for children whose parents worked for long hours outside their homes as agricultural labourers, brick-kiln workers or any other form of labour. These parents usually formed the most marginalized group in the society and their children often suffered abuse and neglect. Especially female children were even worse owing to poor safety conditions. In this situation, SVSS’s initiative for establishing crèches came as a solace. Local persons were trained to take of children, provide them food and sanitary facilities during the day and to ensure their safety. Community members and panchayat representatives helped monitor these services. This is the longest sustaining programme for SVSS running over a period of 30 years since the mid 70’s.