Powering Needs, Empowering Lives
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Some 800 million people globally – as many as a quarter of them in India – have no access to electricity. Far more suffer routine brownouts and power cuts. The result puts the rural poor, who are most impacted, at a severe disadvantage in every way: Health-care services are crippled, education is compromised, and entire communities are cut off from modern industrial and digital livelihoods. In short, a key determinant of social equity goes missing. Harish Hande, an energy engineer, started SELCO in 1995 to pioneer the delivery of decentralized solar power to India’s rural...
info_outline
Healing From Trauma
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Glasswing International teaches Latin American communities to understand and recover from the impacts of trauma induced by chronic and acute violence.
info_outline
From Plow to Prosperity
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Babban Gona provides the capital and means to move Nigeria’s poor farmers from a life of subsistence to economic security.
info_outline
A Fair Deal for Coffee Growers
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Vega Coffee lifts up struggling coffee growers in Latin America by enabling them to roast, package, and ship their own beans directly to US customers—and reinvents the supply chain in the process. This episode covers Vega's story.
info_outline
The Business of Water
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Jibu franchises make clean drinking water affordable for Africa’s booming urban populations and provide economic opportunity to a new generation of entrepreneurs. Hear from the father-and-son team, Randy and Galen Welsch, who started Jibu in 2012. The social enterprise is now a leading purveyor of bottled water in four countries and growing rapidly in three more.
info_outline
A Global Movement for Environmental Justice
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Namati provides legal knowledge to communities around the world to help them defend their land, environmental, and other civil rights against abuse by commercial and political aggressors.
info_outline
The Healing Force of Family
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Even before the pandemic, India’s public hospitals struggled with overcrowding and stretched resources. Noora Health is helping by training family caregivers on simple medical skills to help patients recover at home. This is the second episode of a two-part series about raising the quality of health care in the developing world.
info_outline
The Videos Saving Lives in the Developing World
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Global Health Media marries video technology with compassionate instruction to address a quality crisis in the delivery of frontline health care. This is the first episode of a two-part series about raising the quality of health care in the developing world.
info_outlineThis is the second episode of a two-part series about raising the quality of health care in the developing world.
Even before the onslaught of COVID-19, public health services in many developing countries were chronically strained by a combination of burgeoning populations, severe shortages of trained clinicians, and growing burdens of disease. Noora Health harnesses an untapped resource—the family members of hospital patients in India—by training them in simple medical skills to help their loved ones recover with fewer complications and readmissions once they return home. Noora’s standard of caregiving is already helping to restore trust in India's beleaguered public system and may prove to be a critical element in the country's pursuit of universal health coverage.
This episode tells the story of Noora’s origins as a graduate school project of co-founders Edith Elliott and Shahed Alam and their serendipitous discovery of people's family members as a health resource. Follow their journey as they:
- developed empathy for hospital patients as young teenagers, through the trials of suffering family members of their own (05:02);
- devised a pilot test of their theory of change in an Indian cardiac hospital (10:04);
- determined to turn the school assignment into a professional mission (12:35);
- refined a comprehensive model (14:44) and partnered with the Indian state of Punjab to scale it up (22:47);
- and responded to the COVID-19 crisis in India with novel strategies to help vulnerable families of positive patients stay safe (28:51).
Additional Resources:
- Studies noted or alluded to in the episode:
- Journal of Global Health Reports on the results of the Noora program on cardiac patient recovery;
- BMJ Global Health article citing newborn care results to advocate for the importance of family-focused postnatal education.
- The Noora Health channel on YouTube, providing hundreds of examples of Noora’s materials, including Bollywood-style dramas (mostly in Indian languages).
- Blog post by Noora’s director of training, Anand Kumar, about how Noora began.
The full transcript of the episode can be found at https://ssir.org/podcasts/category/unchartedground.