In the summer of 2019, floods swept across Assam and displaced families who had almost nothing to begin with. For Sneha Karma Foundation, it was a reminder that a girl’s education is only as secure as the home and village that surround her — and that sometimes, before you can talk about school, you have to help a family survive.
When the water comes
Assam lives with water. The Brahmaputra and its tributaries shape the state, and every year the monsoon tests the communities along their banks. But some years are worse than others, and 2019 was one of them. Rivers rose past their danger marks, embankments gave way, and entire villages were submerged. Families who farmed small plots or worked as daily labourers lost their homes, their belongings and sometimes the little they had saved.
For a family living close to the edge, a flood is not an inconvenience. It is a catastrophe that erases the margin of survival. And when survival is at stake, the first casualties are the things that look optional in a crisis — and for a girl, education is almost always the first of them. A flooded home becomes a reason to keep a daughter out of school so she can help; a lost harvest becomes a reason to consider marrying her early so there is one fewer mouth to feed.
The situation: a disaster on top of disadvantage
The families in and around Garbhanga were already among the most remote communities we serve — forest villages far from the nearest town, the nearest hospital, the nearest road that stays passable in the rain. When the floods came, that remoteness turned from a hardship into a danger. Help arrived late if it arrived at all. Supply lines broke. The people with the least ability to move were the least able to reach safety.
What struck us most was how quickly months of quiet progress could be undone. A girl who had finally been enrolled in school, a family that had finally agreed to keep her there, a hostel that had finally won a community’s trust — all of it could be washed away in a week. Displacement does not only take homes; it takes the fragile arrangements that make education possible.
“When one woman stands, her daughters learn that they can too.”
Sneha Karma Foundation
Impact
Our response: re-settling the under-privileged
Our position was simple, and it came directly from the way we understand the mission. We could not stand by while the families who had trusted us were left without shelter. So we appealed to our supporters, and they answered. Together, we helped re-settle families who had been displaced — providing the essentials of survival and recovery, and helping people get back on their feet in the aftermath of the water.
The work was not glamorous. It was the unglamorous, urgent business of relief: helping with immediate needs, coordinating with the organisations and local hands who were already on the ground, and doing our part in a collective effort rather than acting alone. Many were the organisations and individuals who joined hands during those weeks, and together we did the best we could. We say that honestly, because it is true: no single foundation could have answered a disaster of that scale. What mattered was that people did not turn away.
Why disaster relief belongs in a mission about girls
Some might ask why a foundation focused on girls’ education and women’s livelihood would spend time and money on flood relief. The answer is that the two cannot be separated. A girl’s education does not happen in a vacuum. It happens in a home, in a village, in a family that has to be stable enough to keep her in school. When that stability is swept away, the education goes with it.
Emergency response is, in that sense, a form of protection. It keeps a family from reaching the point of desperation where a daughter is married off or sent to work. It preserves the home to which she can return and the community in which she can keep learning. Protecting a girl means protecting the ground beneath her, and sometimes the ground itself is under water.
“Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time.”
Marian Wright Edelman
Founder, Children’s Defense Fund
The lesson: resilience is part of the design
The 2019 floods taught us something that now runs through our program design: resilience has to be built in. It is not enough to help a girl enroll in school if a single bad season can pull her out again. We learned to think about shocks — floods, illness, the loss of a parent’s income — as predictable risks rather than tragic surprises, and to design support that can absorb them.
That is one reason we stay close to the families we serve over years, rather than treating education as a single transaction. Long relationships are what allow us to notice when a household is slipping, to respond before a girl is withdrawn, and to keep a promise that a flood tried to break.
What your support made possible
To everyone who gave during the flood relief effort: thank you. Because of that generosity, families who had lost their homes were helped to re-settle, and some of them were helped to keep their daughters in school through a season that could have ended everything. It was not enough by any absolute measure — no relief effort ever is — but it was real, and it mattered to the people who received it.
Prepared, not surprised
There is a temptation after any disaster to treat it as a one-off — to respond, recover, and quietly hope it never happens again. In Assam, that hope is not realistic. The water will return; the question is only when. So we have tried to let the floods of 2019 change how we plan, not just how we responded. We keep our relationships with families warm enough to notice quickly when something has gone wrong. We think about the girls at greatest risk when a household is destabilised, and we try to act before a crisis becomes the reason a girl is withdrawn from school or married early. Being prepared is not pessimism. It is simply taking the people we serve seriously enough to expect the hard seasons.
Disasters will keep coming to Assam; the water does not ask permission. What we can control is whether the communities we serve face them alone. The floods of 2019 reminded us why we show up, why we stay, and why the work of protecting a girl’s future sometimes begins with simply helping her family find dry ground again.
