Shaifalika Panda: Agency, Not Aid, Creates Sustainable Change

At a time when development narratives are shifting from charity to agency, Shaifalika Panda, Founder of the Bansidhar & Ila Panda Foundation, speaks about building community-owned pathways to change. In this conversation, she reflects on BIPF’s philosophy of empowerment over aid, the inter-generational impact of grassroots interventions in Odisha, and why sustainable development must be rooted in dignity, participation, and long-term vision.

1. How would you describe BIPF’s approach to driving long-term, community-led development?

BIPF enters communities as a catalyst to co-create solutions with deep respect for their lived experiences. We believe that communities understand their challenges best, and our role is to enable them in shaping pathways for sustainable change.

Our focus is on empowerment rather than dependency. By strengthening local institutions and nurturing grassroots leadership—particularly among women and youth—we ensure that development efforts are owned and sustained by the community itself. We place strong emphasis on capacity building and future-ready skills among young people, assisting them to access dignified livelihoods and economic resilience. Our programmes have worked with outcomes of long-term self-reliant outlook – it’s about agency.

Communities are no longer waiting for change—they are active participants. This transition from beneficiaries to co-creators truly reflects the essence of sustainable, community-led development.

2. What are the most meaningful changes you’ve seen on the ground in Odisha through your programmes?

The most powerful change in my opinion is inter-generational shift in aspirations, access and agency – particularly amongst women and adolescent girls. This happens when transformation outlasts an individual and becomes the legacy of the beneficiary. It's about shifting the entire trajectory of a community through cycles of dignity, education, and voice. It’s about shifting mindsets, norms, and opportunities across generations so that change becomes sustained and self-perpetuating.

To cite an example, when we started Kanya Express to address anaemia, the immediate objective was haemoglobin screening and awareness on nutrition and reproductive health. Over time the impact went far beyond clinical outcomes. Conversations around adolescent health and well-being began to enter households more openly, often led by young girls themselves. What we witnessed was not just improved health indicators, but a growing confidence among girls towards health seeking behaviour moving away from early marriages, pregnancies and healthier infants. The gamechanger in the project was the inclusion of adolescent boys in anemia checks, following which the family now pays greater attention to nutritional needs yielding faster improvement towards Poshan Abhiyaan across the family.

3. How do you ensure your initiatives stay relevant and impactful as they scale?

For us, scale is meaningful only when impact remains authentic. Relevance comes from staying rooted in realities. Continuous dialogue and feedback from the field shape our programme design and evolution. Communities are actively involved at every stage, from planning to implementation, ensuring solutions are context-specific and practical. Collaboration is central to our approach and our cross-sectoral approach integrates health, education, and livelihoods to create holistic outcomes. Through multi-stakeholder engagement, we align our efforts with broader development frameworks while maximizing resources.

We prioritise depth over scale. Consistent, meticulous evaluation and field engagement keeps us agile and allow us to adapt in real time; ensuring growth in tandem with effectiveness.

4. What do you see as the most powerful catalysts for women’s economic and social empowerment today?

Women’s economic and social empowerment in India rests on the interlinked pillars of education, income-generation skills, and digital literacy. Education remains the foundational catalyst. It builds confidence, critical thinking, and equips women to make informed choices breaking away from deep rooted social norms.

At the grassroots level, women require a supportive and safe ecosystem that translates learning into livelihoods through income-generation skills, access to credit, mentoring, and local networks. Further, digital literacy plays a crucial enabling role within this ecosystem. Digital skills are a means rather than an end in themselves, and expand access to information, markets, financial services, and public platforms.

When anchored in digital tools, education and livelihood skills can significantly amplify women’s economic opportunities and social agency, enabling sustainable and generational empowerment.

5. How is BIPF strengthening access to quality healthcare and education for underserved communities?

Access to quality healthcare and education is not a privilege, but a fundamental right. Our work in rural Odisha is guided by a simple principle, services must reach remote locations.

In healthcare, we provide medical services to remote and underserved communities through structured outreach and mobile health interventions. Our dispensary serves as a trusted point of support, offering consistent and professional healthcare to local populations. Simultaneously, we place strong emphasis on preventive health by investing in sensitization and community awareness programs on MDD, Maternal & Child Health, Dengue, TB, Anemia. This includes promoting a heath seeking attitude and improved understanding of government health entitlements.

In education, we work closely with local schools to improve infrastructure, strengthen teaching ecosystems, and provide resources that make classrooms more engaging and effective. Through community learning centres (CLC), we educate women with basic literacy on day to day functional requirements. For rural youth, our Digital Learning Centre and the E-Sikshya Express mobile classrooms bridge the digital divide, equipping young people with skills that are increasingly vital in today’s employability sector. To further strengthen the educational landscape for the underserved our K-12 CBSE school provides education for all in underserved locations.

Through these domain-integrated interventions, we are not merely delivering services, we are enabling individuals across rural Odisha to lead healthier, more informed, and aspirational lives.

6. Looking ahead, which areas of philanthropy hold the greatest potential for transformative impact in India?

The development space will benefit from greater alignment amongst stakeholders as many well intentioned efforts operate in silos. Investment in capacity building is critical. The power of philanthropy is in its allocation as risk capital and long term funding. This will allow for redesigning funding structures to be inclusive, flexible and trust based.

Philanthropy in India is increasingly focusing on integrated and systemic solutions. In terms of sectors a lot of funding is now being invested in climate action, mental health, data driven interventions and innovation. The greatest potential for transformative impact in India is for philanthropy to interconnect priorities and play catalyst for change.