Internship with Vijayavahini Charitable Foundation (VCF)

During the winter break of 2018 – 19, I got a wonderful opportunity to intern with Vijayavahini Charitable Foundation (VCF), an initiative of Tata Trusts, based out of Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh. It was an unpaid full time internship from 6^th December 2018 to 21^st January 2019. I was part of the Project Nutrition Team in the office.

VCF was looking for someone who could design an action plan to launch their nutrition project across the villages of Krishna District in Andhra Pradesh. This involved stakeholder engagement including state government officials, Ministry of Women Welfare and Child Development, Ministry of Education and the members from the District and Local Village Administration. I started to carry out these engagements and ensured we had an action plan to launch the project; Parallely I was also directly interacting with the community and prospective beneficiaries to understand the local context and ground reality.

Upon a series of meetings with all stakeholders, I finally came up with an action plan to pilot run our nutrition project in 25 villages. We carried out the training programme and also developed resources including technical expertise and knowledge products.  I was also reaching out to the local policy makers and helped them in programme design for nutrition and early education activities. Throughout the internship period, I spent 90% of the time on the field and visited more than 30 villages during the internship period.

In the end, I delivered the following for VCF: Action Plan to Launch Integrated Nutrition Project, Impact Assessment Plan, Capacity Building tools for local trainers, Stakeholder Engagement Document. My MPP degree and LKYSPP experience was very helpful in my successful completion of the internship. Courses like Public Administration and Politics, Education Economics, Leadership and Decision Making, Public Service Leadership etc were very useful in many ways.

This experience gave me a great exposure to the field and real world of policy making and programme design. I am glad that this work will impact more than 25, 000 women and children across 200 villages in the next 2 years and I am proud that I was part of the team that planned, piloted and executed this project. This shall also help me in the future especially for me as someone who would like to work closely in the field in a developing country. I would like to thank the people at VCF, LKYSPP career service and faculty for the opportunity, encouragement and guidance.