The Antara Foundation Blog

In May 2021, a group of alumni from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad’s class of 1992 (IIMA-92) came together to raise funds for The Antara Foundation’s (TAF) fight against COVID-19. We spoke with them to learn more about their philanthropy and their partnership with TAF. Interview with Kms4Good Your reasons for supporting TAF’s COVID-relief work. We chose to partner with TAF for three key reasons – trust, transparency, and their focus on  preventive maternal, child health and nutrition (MCHN) at the grassroots. TAF’s experienced leadership, a remarkable team of passionate individuals, and their track record in effectively implementing interventions infused a tremendous amount of trust. We greatly value transparency across our partners, especially in terms of ensuring and reporting the right utilization of funds towards the promised cause. With TAF, we were assured that data from the field would always be up-to-date and accurate. Lastly, TAF’s focus to improve MCHN outcomes,

A silver lining during the COVID-19 pandemic has been the dramatic rise of technology as an enabler for service delivery. Virtual meeting tools and software have transformed sectors – for example, tele-medicine in health, virtual schools in education and digital marketplaces for agriculture. In this article, we talk about the promise of virtual platforms to deliver maternal and child health interventions, highlighting three innovations from our work across remote and rural villages of India. The Antara Foundation (TAF) strengthens health systems to improve maternal and child health. Our programs train community health workers (CHWs), make data-sharing more effective, build supervisory capacity and improve health facilities. The lockdowns and safety measures imposed due to COVID-19 caused a slowdown in several program activities due to travel restrictions, limitations on holding large group meetings and the unavailability of health workers because of additional COVID-response duties.

Fighting COVID-19 in India’s villages July 2021 Update In our May 2021 newsletter, we spoke about Antara Foundation’s emergency COVID response, focused on ‘prevention at the village level’ and protecting community health workers (CHWs) in vulnerable communities. We took a three-pronged approach – bridge supply gaps, build capacity and mobilize communities for COVID vaccination ( link to article ). So far, we have provided essential safety and screening equipment to more than 32,000 CHWs and supervisors (~90% of our target), covering ~6,600 villages and ~12,600 health facilities , benefitting a population of more than 10 million across five districts in Madhya Pradesh. Across districts, we actively train CHWs on COVID protocols and proper use of screening equipment through batch-wise virtual meetings, on-site demonstrations during equipment distribution, and through a cascade approach (where we ‘train the trainers’). We have conducted more than 190 training sessions till date, cov