RE: Grant application to request a funding support of £3000 to provide torch lights and school bags with essential snakebite information to educate poor children in remote rural villages of Tamil Nadu, India.
Dear Grant Officer,
Many thanks for your generous support of £2000 last year to print a snakebite pocket guide to use in our snakebite public awareness campaign in rural villages of Tamil Nadu, India. This money has helped a lot to print the pocket guide (attached) and educate numerous children in primary and secondary schools in Tamil Nadu. We received excellent feedback for this pocket guide and our activities.
Since our campaign is mainly focussed in remote rural villages where mostly improvised communities are living, they kindly requested if we can offer some materials that could be useful for children in their every day life with essential snakebite information. Hence, we propose to print the attached snakebite information leaflets with the name of “the Friends of the University of Reading” and include them in torch lights and school bags, and provide them to those poor children studying in government primary and secondary schools. Since most of these children are using outside toilets including in night times, a torch light will be extremely helpful for them to watch out for snakes, as most bites are happening at night times. Notably, some of these villages still don’t have electricity facilities. Moreover, many of these children can’t afford to have proper school bags, and therefore they normally use plastic or cotton shopping bags to carry their books and lunch when going to schools. Therefore, they requested if we can offer school bags with essential information about snakebites. These schools bags may last three to five years for them, and if we print snakebite information on the front and back of these bags, they will disseminate these essential information among other children and people in villages too. The torch lights and schools bags will make remarkable changes in educating them and improve public awareness about the dangers of snakebites.
Hence, we would like to kindly request you to provide a funding support of £3000 to purchase 1000 torch lights (~£1 each) and 700 school bags (~£3 each) with the attached snakebite information leaflet. The leaflet will be printed in a synthetic sheet and included inside each torch light. Similarly this leaflet will be printed in acrylic and stuck on the front and backside of the school bag. The children and general public in rural villages will greatly appreciate this support, as they will be extremely useful in their every day life.
Please let me know if you need any further details and I look forward to hear from you.
Many thanksRegardsSakthiProf. Sakthivel Vaiyapuri MSc., PhDProfessor in Cardiovascular & Venom Pharmacology
Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Research FellowWarden, Mackinder HallInstitute for Cardiovascular and Metabolic ResearchSchool of PharmacyHopkins buildingUniversity of ReadingWhiteknightsReading, RG6 6UBUnited KingdomTel. +44 (0)118 3788015