ENVIRONMENT

Background

A degraded and polluted environment has the worst impact on poor and marginalised communities, and these are the people with the scarcest resources available to counter the damage. Hand in Hand sees the improvement of the local environment as key to the development process. We work with basic environmental issues, including solid waste management, sanitation, watershed promotion, and tree planting. We believe that a clean and green environment helps promote physical and mental health, and improves the community’s socioeconomic status.

Strategy

Our environment programmes aim to make simple changes to the lives of the poor. Garbage and waste management, for instance, is a huge problem in semi-urban areas. Our solid waste management project has made a huge impact here. We have created bands of "green friends”, who collect, separate, and dispose of garbage. We spread awareness about the importance of waste segregation at source. We engage the community and the local government in our work so that they can run the project after we leave.

• Our Green Village project takes on the greening of an entire village, with e.g. tree planting and distribution of flower and fruit trees and shrubs.
• Through our watershed management projects, we hope to renew groundwater, improve cultivation, preserve natural resources, and improve the standard of living in the area.
• We build biogas units in village day-care centres (anganwadis) to provide clean fuel for the children’s midday meals.
• Our vermi-compost project works to promote enterprises that are economically and environmentally sustainable at the same time. Self-help group women are encouraged to start the units, which use up degradable waste and create compost that can be sold to cultivators.