Antara Foundation's COVID-19 response

The sheer scale and speed of the COVID surge spreading across India are concerning. The government is making various efforts to tackle the issue, but much support is required in terms of strengthening health facilities, training frontline health workers, procuring medical supplies, ramping up vaccination drives, and so on. At the same time, it is essential to ensure that critical service delivery in non-COVID areas such as maternal and child health is not affected.

Since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, we have supported the government’s COVID-response efforts on various fronts in our focus districts in Madhya Pradesh. Over the next 6-12 months, in close consultation with district administrations, we will identify and prioritize work in areas such as:

• Building FLW capacity – ongoing training of FLWs (frontline community workers); community demand mobilization, training in-home care
• Strengthening health systems – for COVID prevention, treatment and vaccination; capacity-building support for health officials and supervisors
• Closing infrastructure and supply gaps – enabling the provision of critical supplies such as PPE kits and screening equipment; supporting Village Health and Nutrition Days (VHND, when vaccination is done); supporting primary health facilities
• Restoring maternal and child health services – continue identifying and supporting high-risk pregnancy and malnutrition cases and link them with services

• Over the next few months, we expect to train 2,500-3,000 FLWs – covering a population of >3 million.
• Additionally, we expect our COVID support to have a meaningful and lasting impact on overall health systems strengthening, i.e., to equip the public health system to deliver quality health services sustainably, and not to create a parallel system or stopgap measures alone.