• An ongoing food security initiative in Matkal area of Andhra Pradesh and Ongole (AP), in collaboration with Ankuram Sangham Porum and International Council for Research on Women (ICRW), dealing with right to food, chronic hunger, and how communities can self-organise to meet the challenges of such conditions, and starvation.
  • Our other project for ICRW involved working on the right to food along with a Dalit Women’s Microfinance Collective. Components included a hunger survey, an inventory of government programmes and their efficacy; and interventions like a community kitchen for destitute women, run by women’s groups, and the formation of a Mandal (administrative unit consisting of 25 to 50 villages) level ‘civil societal’ committee for identifying violations and initiating actions to fix statal accountability.
  • We were part of a study team that examined the use of different aid instruments and their effectiveness; with special focus on the implications of moving from project based support to a general budgetary support (GBS), in Andhra Pradesh. Funded by DFID, this study was conducted by the University of Birmingham. It involved interactions and interviews with state government officials in charge of various projects as well as representatives of both bilateral and multilateral agencies.
  • BASIX & Ford Foundation, a new generation livelihood promotion institution working with over 190,000 poor households in 44 districts and eight states of the country, promoting sustainable livelihoods through the provision of financial services and technical assistance in an integrated manner. ThinkSoft has been involved with BASIX, designing and facilitating the first Livelihood Learning Group (LLG), and undertook Financial Diaries project, a study of 25 poor households in an urban slum of Hyderabad. Information of daily income and expenditure of these households were collected over a period of 20 weeks and their financial behaviour analysed in aid of the microfinance sector to better understand the actual needs of the urban poor, and thus design appropriate service offerings.
  • ThinkSoft has also been working with the National Foundation of India, researching on Social Policy Formulation in AP.