Shivanshu Sharma

  • Nani ka ghar

    Last weekend, we took our daughter to Ameen for the first time. Ameen is my mother’s ancestral village in Kurukshetra district, Haryana. The government renamed it Abhimanyupur. Abhimanyu, the young warrior and son of Arjun is said to have died in this village during Mahabharat. We all still call it Ameen. It was a couple…

  • Saanp Ka chatta

    Last weekend my partner and I went to Cafe Athyeka 2.0 in Noida. It was our first dinner date after the birth of our daughter. It was fun. Anyone reading this should try their Chettinad mushroom curry with parotta. Though I love anything with parotta so perhaps do not take my word for it. My…

  • Shared struggles, different contexts: The case for rethinking South-South collaboration

    In recent years, I have noticed that donor interest in South-South collaboration has grown significantly. Foundations, bilateral agencies, and multilateral institutions are funding programs that aim to transfer solutions, and enterprises from one country to another. The intent is to leverage shared development experience and build peer-to-peer learning across the Global South. The design, however,…

  • A story of people’s movement: Thimmapur

    Note: I have written this case study in 2015 during my time as a Young Professional at the Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP), Telangana. It was developed with guidance from Sitaramachandra Machiraju and Vijeta Rao Bejjanki. This was my first time leading a field intervention and my first success. I am reproducing it…

  • Donor-funded captive engagement: The agtech problem?

    I have sat in many programme review meetings to know how this story mostly ends. A development programme partners with an agtech. Farmers are onboarded. Advisory messages are sent. App downloads climb. Field staff visit villages. The logframe target was 40,000 farmers- we reached 50,000. Programme successful. Then the programme ends. Six months later nobody…

  • People like me!

    People like me do not see communities as numbers on a screen. We see living human beings because we were once among them. One of my ex-bosses once told me that the social impact sector needs people with family money. People for whom the salary doesn’t matter, people whose only thought would be how to…