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PRADAN was founded in 1983 as an India-based NGO (Non-Government Organisation).〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/rural-development-ministry-partners-with-ngo-for-nrlm/article4996617.ece )〕 Its title stands for Professional Assistance for Development Action. It is a voluntary organisation registered under the Societies Registration Act of India. In 1983,Vijay Mahajan and Deep Joshi set up PRADAN, inspired by the belief that well-educated people with empathy towards the poor must work at the grassroots to remove mass poverty. Soon there were several score professionals in PRADAN, working in remote villages in many parts of the country, helping poor families enhance their livelihoods through concrete action programmes. PRADAN believes that the path towards conquering economic poverty is through enhancing the livelihood capabilities of the poor and giving them access to sustainable income-earning opportunities. In the process, the poor must be enabled to break free from their past, develop an alternative vision of their future and set achievable goals. They must be equipped with the technical, organisational, negotiating, and networking skills that will facilitate the fulfilment of their goals. Today, some 400 professionals under PRADAN’s fold are working in the remote villages of India, immersing themselves directly with target communities. These young professionals are recruited from universities and hold specialised degrees in subjects like management, engineering, agriculture, and the social sciences. PRADAN professionals, divided into 32 teams, have worked with over 271,000 families in 5,000 villages across seven of the poorest states in the country. A majority of the families that PRADAN works with belong to the Schedule Tribes and Schedule Castes. ==Mission== PRADAN’s mission is rooted in a clear understanding of the societal contexts that make poverty in India complex, a phenomenon which thrives in various interrelated factors including: *The rural poor’s view of themselves; *Their understanding and skills to deal with outside systems; *Their access to resources; *Their technical knowledge to use the resources that they have; *The existence of feudal or semi-feudal agents which deprive the poor of their surpluses; and, *Other causes that are rooted beyond the local context. Over the many years that it has worked with India’s rural poor, PRADAN has learned valuable lessons that serve as a guide to fulfilling the organisation’s mission. Among those learnings are the following: *Alleviating rural poverty is an extremely challenging task. Development efforts must be conducted with the collaboration of different and equally interested actors in order to make an impact. *Rural communities are fragmented along caste and class lines. These tend to restrict the effectiveness of joint action for development. *Among the rural poor, women are generally marginalised, yet they prove to be more effective agents of social change. Sadly, however, such potential is not well-recognised. *There are plenty of resources in the rural areas – including human resources – which remain largely untapped. *There is need for innovation in the social and technical spheres for generating ideas that can affect the rural poor on a large scale. The government remains the biggest and most dominant actor in development, but its efforts have had a limited effect on alleviating rural poverty. This could be due to various factors, including: *lack of access of people to government; *government programmes that have little relevance to rural communities; *inappropriate design of some government programmes and schemes; *low quality of human resources at the implementation levels of government; and, *lack of recognition among government personnel that they have a stake in the poor’s development. The context in which PRADAN operates is changing fast. With all this in perspective, PRADAN seeks to define the space in which it can be most effective, as well as the approaches that can best help the rural poor enrich their lives. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「PRADAN」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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