Educategirls Wins Nasscom Foundation Award: Using Tech For Social Impact

Educate Girls was honored with an award from Nasscom Foundation’s Social Innovation Forum (NSIF) – a ‘Tech for Good’ platform that aims to drive technology led innovation by developing solutions to address gaps in key developmental areas and foster inclusive growth.

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On February 10^th, 2016, Educate Girls was announced as one of the recipients of the Nasscom Foundation Social Innovation Award 2015-16 in the primary and secondary education category. The 11 projects that were awarded (chosen from 1200+ entries), were selected across various categories, including primary and secondary education, skills and employability, women’s empowerment, youth innovators, among others.

What motivates us to use #Tech4Good?

“The development sector traditionally, and even now, is often wary of taking a business-like approach in the way it functions. It also deals with a lot of variables that make impact measurement and wide-spread data collection a mammoth challenge. Which is why the prospect of using technology and digital innovations often seems like an impossible and expensive task. However, at Educate Girls we have always believed that investment and innovation go hand-in-hand. It is ‘social impact’ that truly needs intelligent, progressive and in-depth solutions, because these solutions have ripple effects that will reach the generations after us. That’s why we must explore the use of technology now, and not later!” – Safeena Husain, Founder, Educate Girls.

More about the reason we won this award …

Educate Girls’ ICT-led innovation in primary education is a mobile app that is used for monitoring our program activities. Using Geo-tagging the mobile app requires staff to log in their time spent at every field location alongside the activities performed during field visits. This provides district management real-time visibility and also enables managers to assess the completion and success of planned program activities. The application is constantly evaluated and updated in order to truly keep it relevant and resourceful.

The other major function of this mobile tracking app is the real-time collection of school-level data and key-performance indicators. These indicators include information on enrollment of girls, the attendance and learning outcomes of children in classrooms, improvements in school infrastructure and resources like availability of teachers, separate toilets for girls, access to drinking water etc. and community mobilisation activities. This information allows Educate Girls to quickly identify schools and communities that are not improving on priority indicators and hence need more attention, thus enabling appropriate course correction, making it a more immediate solution-oriented approach.

Additionally, the data collected through the app aids the HR and Finance departments in efficient settlement of travel claims and in validating employee attendance.

The mobile app is currently being used by over 500 field staff, across 7 districts in Rajasthan, covering more than 4500 villages including 7500+ schools, reaching out to more than two million children – a scale that is quite unprecedented in the development sector and especially in rural India.

Other than the mobile tracking system, Educate Girls is also venturing into technological partnerships that will enhance our program activities and create larger and more quantifiable impact.

Media Links:

http://forbesindia.com/article/nasscom-india-leadership-forum-2016/nasscom-social-innovation-forum-aims-to-impact-1-billion-lives-by-2020/42227/1

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2016-02-10/news/70509771_1_nasscom-foundation-ganesh-natarajan-non-executive-chairman

http://blog.socialcops.com/best-practices/7-ngos-using-data-for-impact?utm_term=&utm_content=buffer1c96e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer