Kolkata Foundation

Various Education Projects, including (1) Continued to support the Samaritan Public School at Bankra, West Bengal to provide education to underprivileged boys and girls of the local slum areas. During the year ~1,705 children benefitted from the program across classes Nursery through Eight. (2) Supported the Primary School at the Ek Tara Learning Center to help ~300 underprivileged children of Tiljala and Topsia bustees in Kolkata make up their learning loss due to the devastating effects of Covid. These children were across grades One through Four.

Women's Empowerment - Two Kolkata Foundation Initiatives were launched during the year as pilot programs. Both these initiatives were implemented through our supported nonprofit Mukti. The first is called Shahoshini (meaning Courageous Women in local language) and is geared towards helping women develop agency and decision making power over issues that affect their lives - like gender, discrimination and violence. The objective is to train a cohort of women to address such issues and encourage them to disseminate their learning in their communities and to address these issues in their families, networks and villages. During the year a cohort of 25 Shahoshinis reached out to about 750 women. The second is called Swastho Shongini (meaning Health Partner in local language) and is geared towards creating a low-cost, scalable program for improving healthcare, especially among rural children, adolescents and women, by training village women to become evangelists on health issues including hygiene and nutrition. During the year this team of 24 Swastho Shonginis visited and interacted with about 2,400 families and gathered health data on more than 10,000 individuals.

Various Health Care Projects, including (1) Supported Rural Health Care Foundation (RHCF) in running two primary medical centers serving over 325 villages, to provide high quality medical care to the poor and under-served communities. About 150,000 patients (62% women) were served from these two centers during the year. Areas of treatment included general medicine, optical including providing spectacles, dental, homeopathic treatment, physiotherapy, and cataract surgery. (2) Also supported RHCF in strengthening the health of rural poor by reaching out to inhabitants of these more than 325 villages with trained staff to ensure early diagnosis and effective treatment of underlying disease and ailments for common disorders, especially when they are asymptomatic. Almost 56,000 beneficiaries (51% women) were pre-screened during the year as a part of this Project Outreach. As a result of these efforts about 31% of those screened (about 17,500 people) were diagnosed with various ailments like Joint Pain, Gastric, Optical, Dental, Blood Pressure, Skin related, Blood Sugar, etc. (3) Supported MUKTI with their Gram Clinic to treat about 1,150 underprivileged patients (55% women) during the year from villages in the Sundarbans area (4) During the year about 3,200 patients (45% women) benefited from the PRO Computer Vision Phoropter, and about 1,000 patients (48% women) benefited from the motorized Operation Theater table, provided earlier by the Foundation to Nanritam to enable cataract surgery and quality eye care treatment to the under privileged.