Sangath

Sangath has grown by leaps and bounds since we started Goa’s first multi-disciplinary child development clinic with voluntary contributions from our founders in a one bedroom flat in Porvorim, north Goa.

Over the years, the need to reach out in the larger populace has seen a policy shift in Sangath’s activities from direct service provision in centre based clinics to a public health model aimed at increasing the coverage of basic interventions for child development, adolescent health and mental health. A key element of our philosophy is not to replace the state and private sector services, but to strengthen them by integrating affordable and effective interventions with the goal of scaling up through sustainable health systems.

Sangath recognizes explicitly that NGOs have an extremely limited reach in the Indian landscape and it has fashioned itself to develop innovative strategies of closing the treatment gap for mental disorders. One of our most innovative strategies to use relatively low cost human resources or existing human resources, by empowering them with knowledge and support from more specialized personnel. Examples of this work include:

Training lay people, whom we refer to as health counselors, to deliver psychosocial treatments for depression in adults attending primary health care centres.
Training teachers or lay people, whom we refer to as school health counselors, to deliver a package of interventions with the aim of promoting the health and educational outcomes of adolescents in schools.
Integrating learning resource rooms and remedial educational outcomes of adolescents in schools.
Integrating learning resource rooms and remedial education in mainstream schools with the aim of promoting inclusive education for children with learning disabilities.
Training community maternal and child workers (anganwadi workers) to promote early child development among preschoolers.
Training community out reach workers to promote the mental health of People living with HIV (PLHIV) and their caregivers.

These innovations have gained us national and international recognition about the relevance and appropriateness of our programs. Over the years our work has been driven by a few guiding principles:

Multi-disciplinary interventions: we strongly believe that improving the health of our community requires a mix of social, psychological and medical interventions. The collaboration of diverse academic and health disciplines is likely to generate the most effective interventions.
Linking services with research: Sangath strongly believes that its work must be based on the best evidence available and that all work that we do must be thoroughly evaluated and disseminated.
Participatory methods: We strive, as much as possible, to engage with beneficiaries and to involve them actively in our work.
Inter-sectoral collaboration: Sangath believes that existing community resources,especially those in the public sector, provide the most sustainable setting for delivering interventions. Today, our work is set upon a collaborative framework involving several key partnerships with the government health services, department of education, schools, other NGOs and the Goa Medical College.
Ultimate goal of up-scaling: To be able to develop a model of care that is scaled up through the government machinery is our dream. We strive to achieve this goal through ensuring that we are constantly engaged with policy makers right from developing our projects to disseminating our findings. Today, the fact that Sangath is the nodal agency for two of the Government of India's national health programs is a testimony to our success in this goal.

We were delighted to be awarded the MacArthur Foundation's International Prize for Creative & Effective Institutions in 2008 in recognition of our work. We hope you enjoy reading about our work. Many thanks for your support.