Giving Compass' Take:

• India Development Review reports on Anganwadi workers, women who work in rural centers taking care of poor children;  learning from them can influence policy and philanthropy in India.

• What can the Anganwadi workers tell us about poverty in the United States and its effect on young people? One takeaway: We need to listen to the voices of those on the ground.

• Here's more about Indian nonprofits and scaling social change.

“How many Anganwadi [rural child care center] workers have you met”? When I posed this question to the APPI team in Odisha, India — one that has been set up to help the state government improve nutrition outcomes for its children, the answer was “not many”.  Most of them had seen these Anganwadi women only in training centers.

To my mind, knowledge that was high-level and top-down was going to be inadequate if we, as a foundation, were planning to devise programming that would impact the lives of millions of children in Odisha.

Instead, we thought, what if we went in and spent time on the ground, inside the system, and with the frontline Anganwadi workers (AWWs) — the primary agents of change when it comes to nutrition. Would our worldview change? Could we watch and learn ground-up, and see what emerged as possible (and probably, better) ideas for nutrition-related programs in the state?

Read the full article about the Indian workforce with a near-impossible mandate by Ananthapadmanabhan Guruswamy at India Development Review.