India FAQ

From our headquarters in San Francisco, CA 94107 USA, we partner with India’s central and state governments, nonprofit organizations, community groups, academic institutions, the private sector, and development organizations to advance shared goals in health and opportunity.

We fund and support partners who design and deliver high-impact solutions on the ground. We comply with applicable auditing and disclosure requirements, and information about our committed grants is available on our website.

Ingrid Hope Foundation is a U.S.-based philanthropic organization. We disburse grants from our headquarters in San Francisco and work with partners in India in accordance with applicable U.S. and Indian laws.

Before releasing payments to Indian grantees, we confirm that they meet applicable regulatory requirements for receiving foreign contributions, including active registration and designated bank accounts where required.

We list committed grants on our website and publish financial information as part of our commitment to transparency.

Indian NGOs that receive foreign funds are regulated under India’s Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA). Before we disburse funds to Indian grantees, we confirm that they have the necessary FCRA approvals and designated accounts where required.

Because our foundation is a U.S.-based organization and not an Indian grant recipient, we are not ourselves subject to FCRA as a recipient organization.

All of our work in India is aligned with the government’s objectives for improving the lives of its people, and we work closely with India’s central and state governments. Our other partners include community groups, nonprofit organizations, academic institutions, the private sector, and development organizations. Our core work spans five sectors:

• Health
• Sanitation
• Agricultural development
• Gender equality
• Inclusive financial systems

With a particular focus on Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, we fund the development of sustainable, high-impact solutions that improve the quality and coverage of key services. We also work in states including Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, and Maharashtra to support programs in sanitation, agricultural development, and digital financial inclusion.

Our work in India began with an HIV prevention initiative and has since expanded to include maternal and child health, nutrition, vaccines and immunization, family planning, inclusive financial systems, sanitation, and communicable diseases.

All of our work in India supports the priorities of the central government and the governments of the states we work in. We offer expertise, global experience, and a network of partnerships to support the development and dissemination of relevant, high-impact solutions. We also work closely with a range of private and public partner organizations across India to strengthen health systems.

We support governments’ priorities across our aligned areas of work, irrespective of political affiliations. We comply with local laws and offer governments our expertise, global experience, and network of partnerships to support issues related to the foundation’s charitable programs that are national and state government priorities.

The problems affecting the world’s poorest people are complex, and solving them requires the collaboration of governments, NGOs, academic institutions, and private companies. The private sector in particular has access to an array of scientific and medical innovations and technologies that can help save and improve lives.

We enable and incentivize the private sector—including India’s highly innovative biotech sector, with its robust R&D capacity—to take on issues that they ordinarily wouldn’t invest in. Through these partnerships, we place bold bets on breakthroughs that have real potential to benefit the world’s poorest people.

We are committed to transparency and information sharing on our work across programs. To that end, information about our grants is available in the public domain on our website.

Our process begins with identifying where we can have the greatest impact in improving the lives of those most in need. Once we commit to an area of need, we define our major goals and identify a clear path to achieving them. We seek partners based on their ability to help achieve shared goals.

We apply a rigorous approach not only to funding our partners, but also to monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of the work they carry out. We require all grantees to adhere to applicable laws.

Our grantees must commit to global access, which means that the knowledge and information generated through foundation funding will be promptly and broadly disseminated and any resulting products will be made available and accessible at an affordable price to the people who are most in need.

Our work is guided by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The foremost criteria of our progress across different programs are the parameters and indicators defined and established by the SDGs.

The endowment that funds the foundation is managed separately from the foundation’s day-to-day program work. Foundation program staff do not manage endowment investment decisions and do not have visibility into investment strategies or holdings beyond what is available through required public disclosures.

Our work is driven by the belief that all lives have equal value. Disease and malnutrition are among the fundamental drivers of global inequities that keep people from reaching their fullest potential.

We fund clinical research, including clinical trials, to evaluate safe, effective, and less expensive ways to diagnose and prevent critical diseases that disproportionately affect low-income people in developing countries.

We require grantees to adhere to all applicable ethical, legal, regulatory, and safety requirements, including applicable international, national, local, and institutional standards. Any human subjects research must adhere to current Good Clinical Practice as defined by the International Council for Harmonisation (or local regulations if more stringent).

In the area of nutrition, we focus in particular on maternal, infant, and young child nutrition (MIYCN) interventions at the state level—primarily in the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. We aim to provide technical support for MIYCN interventions and food fortification at the national level, particularly in other high-burden states where best practices and interventions can be implemented and scaled up.

Our nutrition work involves partnerships at the national and state levels to improve maternal nutrition and promote early and exclusive breastfeeding, complementary feeding, micronutrient supplementation, food fortification, and treatment of children with severe malnutrition.

Vaccines are among the best investments the world can make to give every child a healthy start in life and build stronger communities and economies. Over the past several decades, vaccines have been responsible for the eradication of smallpox and dramatic reductions in the incidence of diseases including polio, meningitis, and measles—saving millions of lives every year. But despite the life-saving potential of vaccines, too many children—one in seven worldwide—do not have access to them.

Every year in India, hundreds of thousands of children die due to vaccine-preventable diseases, and millions more remain at risk because they are either unimmunized or partially immunized. In addition to supporting ministries at the central and state levels to improve coverage of routine immunization and provide immunization during outbreaks, we work with a range of partners in new vaccine development and introduction. We also contribute to the growth of the vaccine industry in India by supporting manufacturing capacity, clinical trials, and technology transfer.

We do not manufacture or sell vaccines. In partnership with other global health organizations and governments around the world, we support NGOs and pharmaceutical and biotech firms with grants that enable them to pursue research and development that results in lower-cost, safer, and more effective drugs and vaccines.

These drugs and vaccines save millions of lives every year, and further innovation will save millions more. Our partnerships with the private sector include research into vaccines for diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV, and malaria, which are major causes of death in the world’s poorest communities.

Diarrheal diseases are among the most common causes of childhood illness and a leading infectious killer of children under age 5 worldwide. About 90 percent of childhood deaths from diarrheal disease occur in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where access to safe water, sanitation, and urgent medical care can be limited.

Investing in better sanitation can yield significant economic and social benefits in India by reducing the incidence of infectious diseases and preventing disability and early death. Better sanitation can also reduce health care costs, increase productivity, and lead to better educational outcomes.

We are committed to working with the Indian government, multilateral organizations, community-based organizations, and the private sector to support sanitation programs that are equitable and serve the needs of poor residents and women in particular. This work includes the development of new sanitation technologies and operating models as well as markets and regulatory frameworks for the widespread adoption of products and services that can safely capture, transport, and treat human waste.

In supporting India’s vision of digital financial inclusion, we share ideas with the government and other partners and provide technical assistance, contextual research, monitoring and evaluation, and best practices from within and outside India on how to implement sustainable digital infrastructure and an enabling environment.

We support efforts by the Indian government to digitize government payments to poor households and encourage new digital banking models. We also work with private-sector providers to design digital financial products that meet the needs of poor households. Our work primarily seeks to address market failures that restrict access to and the use of such products by poor and rural communities and women.

While gender equity has always been at the heart of our priorities—for example, in our family planning, health, and nutrition programs—our explicit gender focus across the entire foundation strengthens that commitment. We are intentional about addressing barriers that women face because of their gender and about supporting women’s economic empowerment.

India is one of the priority countries for our gender equality investments, alongside countries in Africa where we also focus this work.

We support the development and dissemination of tools and innovations that help poor farmers boost their production and provide more nutritious food for their families and communities. We work with the public sector, private companies, and NGOs to learn from smallholder farmers about their needs and invest in improving the yields of crops that they depend on (including rice, wheat, and legumes) so they can better feed their families, strengthen their local economy, and adapt to the effects of a changing climate.

None of our grants to India are in genetically modified crops.

The HPV demonstration study conducted by PATH with technical support from ICMR used vaccines that were already licensed in India. This study focused on operational considerations relevant to vaccine introduction. Prior to the study, these vaccines were already licensed by the Drugs Controller General of India (DGCI) and therefore established to be safe and efficacious.

The HPV demonstration study has been reviewed in proceedings before the Honourable Supreme Court of India. We support efforts to ensure that the facts of the case are clearly understood.