About Us
Who We Are
Raah Health & Social Development Foundation is an Indian not-for-profit, community-based, secular organisation dedicated to harnessing the power of social, scientific, and technological innovation to improve health and well-being at the grassroots.
What We Do
Health and development strategies often fail the global poor. Usually conceived by outsiders from the top down, many prove unworkable in the context of entrenched challenges at the last mile. Recognising the importance of power and participation in defining problems, opportunities, and solutions, we strive to learn together. We embed the innovation process within communities to ensure that ideation, testing, adaptation, and scaling respond to local priorities, generating authentic learning and impactful solutions.
Much of our work focusses on women and children’s health, which transforms futures for individuals, families, and entire societies. We are currently developing an exciting range of social and technological innovations, many of which aim to strengthen the performance and reach of immunisation systems. We invite you to explore our projects!
Where We Work
Our field work is conducted in a rural district of the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. Uttar Pradesh is India’s most populous state with more than 200 million inhabitants and especially poor health and development indicators. Hardoi (population 4.1 million) is a low-performing district within Uttar Pradesh. The Indian government views Uttar Pradesh and Hardoi as high-focus areas for health, development, and immunisation.
While our work is proudly local, our aspirations are global. We aim to contribute ideas, evidence and solutions that can be adapted meaningfully to other geographies and widely scaled.
Our Story
Our journey began in 2012 when our idea for a participatory, community-based approach to strengthen the demand for childhood immunisation won the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Explorations competition. We completed our 18-month project – and decided to stay. The process of community-embedded learning showed us that the real problems and solutions must be found in the field, and together. Our team gained in strength and experience with every project. As for many others, the global Covid-19 pandemic forced us to reassess our ways of working and to reimagine our futures. In 2020, Raah Health & Social Development Foundation was legally registered as an Indian not-for-profit organisation.
Our Values
- A fair chance. We believe that everyone should have an equal opportunity to achieve good health. Good health is intrinsically valuable; moreover, it unlocks a myriad of possibilities to learn, grow, and to realise one’s dreams. By contributing to health equity, Raah aspires to offer everyone a fair chance in life.
- Empowering local actors. Catalysing change in contexts of entrenched inequalities is extremely difficult. Raah puts local actors at the centre of change. We believe that those with lived experience of an issue or problem are best positioned to understand its root causes and judge workable solutions.
- Building shared success. We are a learning organisation that strives to nurture the capacity of our members, to build a shared vision of success, and to continuously improve upon our ability to reach our goals. Our field team is an integral part of our work. We have been working in the same location and have retained largely the same core field team since 2012.
- Social inclusion. We value equality, diversity, and take pride in investing in local capacity. For us, each team member is also a partner and a future changemaker. See Work environment.
- Integrity. As part of our commitment to members, partners, funders, and the general public, we invest in excellent governance, financial and legal policies and procedures to ensure that research is conducted to the highest standards and that investments in the organisation are correctly and efficiently used. See Governance/ Financial Stewardship and Governance/ Ethical conduct of research.