Our work in India

Paul Hamlyn Foundation has been funding development work in India since 1992. It is the only place we work outside the UK. We give grants to local NGOs for health, education, support for people with disabilities, shelter and other social development activities. The grant assessments and relationships are managed by a small and expert team based in India, and trustees visit annually to meet advisors and see the work being supported. We support about 20–30 organisations across the country in any one year.

Our mission in India is closely aligned to the Foundation’s overarching strategy and is “to improve the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable communities in India in a manner that assists them to make efforts to improve their own conditions, ensuring that they have access to their entitlements, creating and providing appropriate opportunities and also by helping influence change in the context within which they live”.

We seek to be a small but significant donor organisation in India.

In December 2012 we published a new strategy that set out to achieve three key aims for the programme over the five years from 2013–18. These are:

  • To enable vulnerable communities living in priority geographic areas to improve their lives
  • To enable especially vulnerable people living anywhere in India to improve their lives
  • To develop the capacity of organisations and people who facilitate the first two aims

Our strategy for India focuses on ‘knowledge creation’ as an important intended outcome of the work that we will support (and have supported) and stresses the need to work on enhancing human and institutional capacities within the development sector in the country. It provides a rationale for our geographic reach and identifies some especially vulnerable groups which require more proactive support, positioning the Foundation to provide that. We have also begun to see the growing link between rural and urban development issues and we have started to expand our work in urban areas as a result. With this work, as with the rest of the programme we have described, our intention is to enter into collaborations when we believe we can add value and which help achieve our strategic goals.

Related to this, we are keen to advance through research the understanding of issues relating to our strategic aims for both us and for those that we fund. As with our work in the UK, the India programme will aim to contribute to our ambition to be an exemplar foundation.