By Maria Bystedt, H&M Foundation
When we launched Saamuhika Shakti in 2019, the H&M Foundation’s first Collective Impact initiative in Bengaluru, India, we had one goal — improving the quality of life of informal waste pickers and enabling them with the agency to lead more secure and dignified lives.
Waste pickers are a critical part of every city’s solid waste management ecosystem and form the first leg of the vast recycling value chain in the country. Despite the economic and environmental value they add to the city, waste pickers continue to remain among the most marginalised groups and are largely ‘invisible’ to the residents of the city.
Through detailed studies comprising in-depth consultations with waste picker households, as well as global and national organisations working with waste pickers, we identified some of the multi-dimensional economic and social problems faced by the community.
We learned that to address such problems, our approach must shift from addressing single challenges serially in silos to looking at comprehensive methodologies to move the needle towards change and progress. The genesis of Saamuhika Shakti was from this realignment of our philanthropic strategy, recognising that social problems are multi-dimensional, exist within complex systems and need an innovative systems change approach that brings together experts in their field and enables cross-sector collaborations. We also realised that the analysis of such problems and the designing of their potential solutions must be done only after engaging directly with the primary actors , the community of informal waste pickers who have the lived experience around these issues and are keenly aware of the solutions they require and seek. They needed to also be part of the program design to ensure there is ownership and continuity of the interventions.
We found the highly structured Collective Impact approach to be ideal for building a collective of community members, actors , and institutions with equal voice to advance equity by learning and working together — their strengths, experiences, and resources channelled into common goals.
Ten partners — all experts within their fields — and an independent backbone organisation, came together under this collaborative framework to work on a program to provide holistic solutions to address key socio-economic problems identified by waste pickers themselves as areas of concern.
In Phase 1, which ran between 2020 and 2023, Saamuhika Shakti covered both economic aspects such as livelihoods, as well as social aspects such as education, health, housing, water and sanitation etc. with a specific focus on ensuring that women, girls and other vulnerable groups have equitable access to the outcomes. Importantly, it also focused on the critical aspect of bringing more recognition and dignity to the work of informal waste pickers.
In the four years since we launched Saamuhika Shakti, two things have come to solidly characterise it — Resilience and Collaboration.
Resilience of the waste pickers we work with, of our partners who have adapted and thrived through waves of a pandemic to continuously deliver their programs and reach the community, and of our collective itself which has evolved into a pioneering force that not only demonstrates that Collaboration is possible, but that by working together, more is possible than just the sum of its parts.
In December 2023, we successfully closed the first phase of Saamuhika Shakti, which was full of learning, generating strong evidence about the approach and creating the kind of impact we hoped it would. It encouraged us to take Saamuhika Shakti into a second phase starting this January.
Phase 1’s success, we think, is largely due to the deep trust built by our partners and nurtured by the backbone, The/Nudge Institute, through transparency, consistent feedback and persistent commitment to a set of agreed-upon principles and goals.
One cannot expect different non-profits, each established in their areas and with their working styles, to collaborate on project goals from Day 1. Each of the different actors would need to be guided on pathways to collaborate and explore ways to co-create their programs. We could not assume that merely asking partners to collaborate was enough for it to happen.
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To address this challenge in the first couple of years of the program, The/Nudge Institute organised multiple team building and learning exercises for all partners, addressing all branches of work and all levels of personnel — right from community resource people to mid-managers and senior leaders independently as well as together. Working groups for each critical function - Communication, Project Implementation and Gender - were set up, with regular team check-ins to ensure continuity and sustainability.
Over the four years of Phase 1, collaboration deepened significantly. Partners began reaching out to each other - referring participants to each others’ interventions, working on activities together, and sharing knowledge, resources and infrastructure.
Recognising that this kind of seamless collaboration took nearly the whole of the first phase to evolve, for Phase 2, both the partners and the backbone decided to hard code collaboration into the design of the project.
In the final months of the first phase, The/Nudge got all partners together in a room to discuss how they would work with others in the collective going forward. Partners suggested areas of collaboration themselves and also co-created joint key performance indicators on which they would be evaluated and monitored together — holding all of them equally accountable for working together.
These collaborative KPIs promise to take collaboration to new heights because it is about our partners supporting each other to work together at the program level, on the ground!
For the three years of Phase 2, from 2024 - 2027, to build on the incredible work of our partners and The/Nudge Institute, the H&M Foundation welcomes on board Sattva, which will take on the role of the independent backbone from The/Nudge.
Sattva has been working with foundations, philanthropists, companies, non-profits, multi-laterals and impact ecosystems across India, Africa, and Asia since 2009 to develop scalable solutions for a sustainable world. The philosophy of collaboration is already at the heart of Sattva’s work, as is their belief that societal and environmental issues cannot be solved by any one stakeholder alone.
Sattva’s conscious effort to bring multiple stakeholders together and co-create effective, inclusive and sustainable models of change combined with Saamuhika Shakti’s stellar collaboration and impact potential, we believe, will go a long way in maximising the benefits of the collective impact model and encourage many more philanthropies, nonprofits and development sector actors to adopt the systems change approach.
Along with Sattva, we also welcome two new implementing partners, Sparsha and Udhyam Learning Foundation, to Phase 2.
Sparsha will work to further strengthen Saamuhika Shakti’s work with the children of informal waste pickers. Sparsha’s interventions will focus on the children’s education, holistic development and skilling, as well as strengthen institutional and teacher capacities.
Udhyam will support the 200 plus nano-entrepreneurs created during Phase 1 from among the waste picker community, and look to co-create solutions to ensure these entrepreneurs continue on the path of entrepreneurship.
Saamuhika Shakti’s first phase has brought with it immense learning and demonstrated that a systems change approach is indeed scalable and replicable — as evidenced by our second Collective Impact initiative in Bangladesh.
What makes Saamuhika Shakti successful is not only its ability to work collaboratively but also its willingness to explore different models, innovate and find disruptive solutions to break the vicious cycle of intergenerational poverty, while ensuring that change is sustainable. Its impact reinforces our belief in a coordinated systems change approach. With our partners focused on the overarching goals, and treasuring the community they work with, we head into Phase 2 confidently and optimistically!
