NASSCOM Foundation has entered into partnership with American Express to drive social innovation through NASSCOM Social Innovation Forum, and provide free technology education to young girls utilizing the freely available public library space as training centres.
American Express will be donating Rs.1.32 crore for these projects from its CSR budgets. Of this total grant amount, Rs.1 crore will be utilized towards NASSCOM Social Innovation Forum in providing grants and mentorship to social innovators in the area of Financial Inclusion, Healthcare & Sanitation, and Environment. The remaining, Rs.32 lakh, will be utilized under NASSCOM Foundation’s Indian Public Library Movement to train young girls on technology skills, using public libraries as the training centres. The project – Technology empowering Girls – will be run in four libraries, catering to a minimum 200 adolescent girls each year, per library.
“We believe giving back to the community is not only integral to running a business sustainably, but also part of our individual responsibilities as citizens of the world. In our own experience, the most impactful leadership and innovation in our company has come from women, and this gives us the sense of purpose to partner with NSIF on this initiative to pass the baton to empower young women in the country,” said Pradeep Kapur, Senior Vice- President, American Express Global Servicing Network – Japan and Asia-Pacific.
Commentiong on the same, Shrikant Sinha, CEO, NASSCOM Foundation, said, “We are glad to partner with American Express, where we are trying to strengthen both the technology based social innovation ecosystem and the ease of technology adoption for the underserved. This partnership will also be giving a renewed purpose to the public libraries and we hope that more corporate come forward to help reimaging and reposition our public libraries as the centre of our community engagement.”
Through this onboard, American express joins Mphasis, in becoming the official partner for NASSCOM Social Innovation Forum, where the latter will be supporting the social innovations in the areas of education and accessibility.
The selected winners 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. The Forum aims to drive CSR capital to encourage and scale innovations across relevant and topical themes in the country.
The applications for NSIF are open until 31st October, 2017.
