FEDINA was created in 1983 with an intention of reaching the poorest of the poor, the oppressed and the marginalized in order to help them gain self-sufficiency to improve their living conditions. The single main objective being – empowerment of the marginalized. FEDINA has four major work components to address different aspects of the process of empowerment – consciousness raising, interaction with the community and capacity building leading to formation of grassroot organisations and federations and capacity to negotiate with the Government and other concerned people.

FEDINA helps facilitate these communities to acquire productive assets, and help them in developing these assets by providing adequate infrastructure. FEDINA works towards economic empowerment of people through promoting savings and credit initiatives like self-help groups, with incentives in the form of small matching grants. Gender equality, promotion of women’s rights and women’s participation in political and administrative institutions, enabling women to get elected and actively participate in local institutions at all levels and creation of cells in communities for protection and promotion of women’s rights is also an important objective of FEDINA. FEDINA also helps provide support for housing initiatives as well as provide for community based sanitation infrastructure for betterment of living standards and linking community sanitation demands with environment sanitation needs. They are also working towards promotion and implementation of decentralised wastewater treatment systems especially for poor settlements in urban and semi-urban areas. They are working in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Northern Kerala as well as Maharashtra and Haryana.