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Anjalli Kumar (center of photo) worked as a fundraiser for the Naandi Foundation from February 2005 to April 2007. She completed an internship at GPOBA in the summer of 2008 and went on to study in the U.S.

In this interview, Anjalli gives her perspective on applying for GPOBA funding.

 GPOBA: How did you first get involved with the Naandi Foundation?

Anjalli: I joined the Naandi Foundation in February 2005, after having worked in sales and marketing in the private sector in India. I wanted to move into development work and was looking for an NGO that partnered with the government, because I believed that government support was necessary to achieve scale to impact rural poverty. Naandi fit the bill. The Foundation was set up on the call of the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh who invited private industrialists to participate in the state’s development, especially in the areas of irrigation, education and nutrition. The industrialists set Naandi up as a corpus, meaning that they made personal contributions to the initial endowment.

GPOBA: What was your role in Naandi?

Anjalli: In the beginning Naandi operated as a funding agency and early on it was involved in providing school meals through a private-public partnership. In 2003 Naandi became an implementing agency, so there was a need for scaling-up and raising extra funds from donor agencies and corporate foundations. As part of Naandi’s global partnership team, I was involved in this fundraising effort and in developing reports on Naandi’s activities.

GPOBA: So how did you come into contact with GPOBA? And why did Naandi decide to try out an output-based aid approach?

Anjalli: I first heard about GPOBA through the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP). Naandi had partnered for a one-off pilot project with Water Health International (WHI) who had UV-based water purification technology that they wanted to apply in developing countries to make water safe and affordable. This technology is effective in bacteria and virus decontamination and is especially suitable for rural areas which have limited access to reliable electricity supply and highly qualified maintenance staff. In Andhra Pradesh there is a problem of continuous and repeated flooding due to cyclones, and techniques like boiling water are not always affordable or efficient for rural communities.

At the time of my first contact with WSP, Naandi and WHI had one pilot water treatment plant in the village of Bomminampadu. This project was run in a partnership between the local government, WHI and Naandi. WHI provided the technology, services to maintain the plant and a chunk of the funding. Naandi’s role was to handle relations with local leaders and the community and to raise awareness of the importance of clean water, especially among local women who are the ones who choose the family’s water source. The local government supported the project in many ways, for instance by facilitating meetings with prospective donors, paying for pond cleaning and maintenance, and organizing the electricity connection for the plant.

WSP heard of the project in Bomminampadu and sent some of their regional personnel to visit it to gather more information on this pilot project. . They were very impressed with what we were doing and the results we had achieved, such as a reduction in cases of gastroenteritis and diarrhea. The WSP staff knew about output-based aid and thought that the OBA approach could fit well with Naandi’s emphasis on service delivery and accountability to the end-users. They encouraged us to apply for funding from GPOBA which we did, using information from GPOBA’s website such as OBApproaches on other projects.

GPOBA: How easy (or difficult) was it applying to GPOBA for funding?

Anjalli: We encountered several challenges on the way to signing a grant agreement with GPOBA. Our project was not about directly connecting individual households so it was difficult to structure it to be in line with GPOBA’s other projects that were based on household subsidies. There was a lot of back and forth with GPOBA staff in Washington about the subsidy and in the end, GPOBA’s Panel of Experts agreed to a community subsidy, rather than a subsidy for individual households. There were also some issues about procurement. We had to follow the World Bank’s procurement rules to determine WHI’s eligibility as the preferred operator for the OBA project. This involved a techno-commercial evaluation of the proposals received by Naandi from some other leading organizations in the water sector in India.

GPOBA: How would you sum up the purpose of the community water project?

Anjalli: The aim of the community safe water schemes is to make safe water widely available and affordable. Safe water shouldn’t be a luxury product. It is fundamental to health and well-being and should be available to everyone in India.

GPOBA: Thank you very much, Anjalli. One final question: You are currently studying in the U.S. What are you planning to do after you’ve completed your course?

Anjalli: After I finish my studies in the U.S. I am thinking of going back to India to work on water and sanitation partnerships using an OBA approach!

December 2008

For more information on the Naandi Foundation, please visit: www.naandi.org