Bangalore, September 20, 2017: Bangalore is known as the start-up hub of India accounting for the maximum number of start-ups in the country. But slowly and gradually, it is making its mark in the Social Innovation space as well.
As NASSCOM Social Innovation Forum – India’s Largest Social Innovation Platform, steps into its 10th edition, NASSCOM Foundation, along with its partner and Mphasis is hopeful that like the last few years, Bangalore will come up with some breath taking innovations across the categories of Financial Inclusion, Healthcare, Environment, Education, accessibility and other social issues.
In the past, Bangalore has given India some really amazing social innovations that the whole country could be proud of.
One such innovation in the education space that addresses and keeps a track of the learnings of an underserved child – Vchalk was one of the NASSCOM Social Innovation winners in 2016.
Vchalk has developed a comprehensive learning progress tracking tool that makes learning progress for each child visible. The cross platform tool creates an individual profile for each child and allows teachers to record attendance, track skill development in real time and generate reports when necessary. The organisation also encourages parents of under privileged students to get engaged with their child’s learning through IVRS calls where parents will be guided in their local language to ask children specific questions to understand and assess skill development.
The tool works within a larger set up to provide a remedial program for many of the private schools. Targeted at students from 3rd-5th standard the organisation takes the burden of the school by training instructors to use their remedial curriculum, equipping instructors with course material and tracking students growth after the remedial program is implemented using the vChalk technology.
In a recent study UNESCO has advised that all students should be taught in a language that they understand, unfortunately 40% of children globally do not have this luxury. Especially in a country as linguistically diverse as India, children especially from lower income backgrounds face a serious dearth of learning material and books in local languages. Publishers tend to get intimidated by the sheer volume of books they would need to publish in the different languages to effectively solve the problem. Given that a majority of this overlooked population belongs to the lower income section of society, the return on investment for publishers is seen as far too low.
StoryWeaver, created by Pratham Books and NASSCOM Social Innovation Forum Winner for 2017, is India’s first digital, open source repository of multilingual children’s stories. StoryWeaver provides users with an array of tools to help them read, translate, create, download, share and print content for free.
The repository currently contains over 2200 stories in 52 languages and is available globally. In less than one year the platform has had over 100,000 unique visitors with its stories being read over 200,000 times. Through it’s outreach programs StoryWeaver has impacted another 150,000 children. The organisation estimates it’s readership in one year as 800,000.
NASSCOM Foundation is confident that Bangalore can produce many more technology based innovative solutions that can bring about a positive change across the country and urges all social enterprises and NGOs with similar solutions to apply for NSIF at www.nsif.in.
This year with support from Mphasis, NSIF will award catalytic grants of 10 Lakhs to strongest tech innovations that are creating radical social impact in areas of Financial Inclusion, Healthcare, Environment, Education and Accessibility.
The projects will also be provided with a 12-month Support to Scale Mentoring by experts in the industry as well as access to NASSCOM Foundation’s network of tech for good leaders in the country.
For details on the NSIF application process and more, please visit – www.nsif.in or write to the team at nsif@nasscomfoundation.org .
Applications for NSIF are open from 21st September 2017 till 31st October, 2017.
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