What we do and why it matters
The Child in Need Institute (CINI) was founded in 1974 in Kolkata by Dr Samir Chaudhuri, a paediatrician and humanitarian, who has dedicated his life to serving marginalised communities suffering from inter-generational socio-economic deprivation. Today, CINI operates across four vulnerable states in east India providing direct and indirect assistance to around seven million people living in Assam, Jharkhand, Odhisa and West Bengal.
We make change happen by working alongside women, children and adolescents in deprived communities, and partnering with key stakeholder to improve access to health services, nutrition, education and child protection. Our teams use the CINI Method to create Child Friendly Communities which ensure the human rights of children are protected and they have the chance to thrive.
The impact that we achieve is a result of the way we collaborate with communities we serve, and how we join forces with public institutions to strengthen their capability and capacity to deliver joined up services effectively and efficiently.
After almost 50 years working in the field alongside diverse, vulnerable groups, we’ve developed a deep knowledge base and have learned many lessons along the way. We’ve implemented thousands of projects, measured their impact and innovated to create sustainable solutions for communities, stakeholders and governments in both urban and rural settings.
We believe it is our responsibility, as a learning organisations, to distil our learnings, develop best practice and disseminate our knowledge to others. We do this through the CINI Research Centre.
We also ask others to assess our methods to measure success. In 2019 Harvard University’s Center for Health and Human Rights described CINIs approach as a “sophisticated and wide-ranging intervention into entrenched socio-economic deprivations ….[that]…. generates significant buy-in for children’s rights, shifts in attitude and performance.”
CINI will continue to innovate to support communities in need and find ways to create change for mothers, children and adolescents.
In 2023, we won the prestigious Community Based Health Solutions Award at the CSR Summit for Project-Suswasthya (Good Health). This project assisted around 6,000 nutrition risk pregnant women, sick neonates, malnourished children and young adolescents, and provided capacity building support for more than 4,000 government front line workers.
To find out more about what we do, how we do it and why it works, contact Jon (jon@cini.org.uk) or email CINI in India at cini@cinindia.org.
Using the CINI Method to create Child Friendly Communities is the approach we take to tackle entrenched, multi-generational disadvantage in the communities where we work.
Our way of making change happen is a result of working alongside, listening to and learning from the vulnerable communities we’ve served for almost 50 years. Over this period, CINI has implemented a diverse array of projects, developed metrics to measure their impact and innovated to create sustainable solutions to complex challenges. Learn more about CINI Method and Child Friendly Communities here.