BPF is committed to co-creating innovations which are pro-poor, inclusive, and gender sensitive. It identifies, documents, innovates, and disseminates best practices in development. Since its inception in 1999 the vision of the Founder-Director Dr Sangeetha Purushothaman and passion of the team shaped the course of the journey of documenting the best practices being implemented across the various verticals in health & nutrition, gender, education, livelihoods, governance, labor, natural resource management and water & sanitation in India and other parts of the world.
Research and documentation forms a core area of our work. We fulfill our commitment to the needs of marginalized and grassroots communities by taking a participatory approach to building institutional capacity. We do this in the following ways:
Conducting impact assessments through rigorous evaluation
Creating communication tools and policy briefs aimed at advocacy
The overlap between research and action offers unique insights into best practices and critical gaps. Our grassroots branch, BPF Dharwad, Karnataka, has been an incubation site for new ideas and innovations aimed at empowering the poor since 2005.
BPF has been working as the acting secretariat for the Mahila Samakhya, a women’s rights based government program.
LIVELIHOODS
Market Oriented Value Enhancement
Livelihood programmes typically focus on manufacturing skills, credit linkages and resource availability. Participants are not trained to think about markets until they are ready to sell. When production precedes marketing, they may be confronted with inadequate demand resulting in wasted effort, resources, perhaps even mounting debt. Without adequate market orientation, poor entrepreneurs lack the wherewithal to switch to more profitable enterprises when markets fail.
Our experience indicates that the survival rate of micro-enterprises increases significantly when entrepreneurs are market oriented from the outset. In 2004, after several attempts, we introduced a participatory training model called Market Oriented Value Enhancement (MOVE). Originally developed for landless, illiterate rural women, MOVE is now recognized as a practical, profitable and very low risk approach to creating sustainable market niches. Over the years it has been replicated and adapted for poor youth, quarry workers, beedi workers, sexual minorities and women with HIV/AIDS.
ADVOCACY
At BPF we believe that outreach is vital to create awareness, provide information and disseminate innovations. Over the last 2 decades, we have developed considerable expertise in advocating natural resource management, livelihoods, vocational education and gender issues.
Our policy briefs analyse key challenges, offer solutions and make recommendations for desirable change. We engage in ongoing dialogue with heads of state departments and district agencies. We also employ targeted approaches to influence issue-based task-forces in the Planning Commission of India.
CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
Best Practices Foundation innovates with the poor to develop new solutions that address real needs on the ground. To this end, we partner with corporate organisations committed to positive social outreach through livelihood, gender and governance related CSR initiatives that promote sustainability of livelihoods, the environment and society as a whole.
