Across rural India, climate change is severely impacting livelihoods. Erratic rainfall, prolonged dry or wet spells, cyclone, and rising temperatures are not just environmental challenges—they are severely impacting rural families whose incomes depend on agriculture and allied livelihoods.

Ambuja Foundation is a leading rural development NGO offering a household approach to promote and strengthen rural agriculture, women empowerment.

This World Environment Day, as the world focuses on ‘Ending Plastic Pollution,’ it's time to shine a spotlight on rural India—where the plastic crisis is growing silently but steadily.

Ranjana is the President of Kumkum Self Help Group, has two children, and her husband used to work as a laborer under a contractor. However, during the Covid-19 crisis, her husband lost his job, due to which the income of her family stopped – making it difficult to run the household and cover expenses.

Ambuja Foundation is fortunate to have a visionary Chairman at the helm of its Board of Directors, whose success in business is widely lauded – having built one of India’s iconic companies. However, as a humble and quiet gentleman who doesn’t like to stand on his own soapbox, it is often difficult to get inside the mind of Narotam Sekhsaria to understand what makes him tick. In an intimate interview with Thrive, Mr Sekhsaria shares his bold dreams and desires for the future of Ambuja Foundation.

Throughout the world, people want the same things - access to clean air and water; economic opportunities; a safe and healthy place to raise their kids; shelter and a say in the decisions that affect their lives.

"Whenever we have enabled communities to chart their own progress, they have reached far greater heights," points out Pearl Tiwari - CEO of Ambuja Foundation in this riveting interview with Thrive.

By pooling the resources of different stakeholders, Ambuja Foundation has been able to swiftly scale its Skill & Entrepreneurship Development Institute programme across 11 states. Working in collaboration with Government and Corporate Partners, Ambuja Foundation has helped to grow the programme from 1 centre in 2006 to 33 centres in 2019.

By building people's institutions, Ambuja Foundation generates a multiplier effect- empowering men and women to run their own Federations or Farmer Producer Organisations and kickstarting a movement in the process.

Ambuja Foundation's rigorous programme monitoring process is helping get 'more bang for buck' per project, by harnessing qualitative and quantitative data to monitor each project and identify ways in which we can improve our work and generate multiple impacts.

Most countries have a singular objective when it comes to economic growth - to improve the lives of its citizens. But, regrettably, India's strong economic growth in the past has consistently excluded the rural poor, which constitutes approximately 71% of our population.

One of our earliest learnings at Ambuja Foundation, was that to tackle poverty in rural India, we needed to build the livelihood capabilities of rural people.