Nasscom Foundation partners American Express to provide free tech education to girls

BANGALORE, INDIA: Nasscom Foundation today announced its partnership with American Express to provide free technology education to young girls utilizing the freely available public library space as training centres.

The partnership is also aimed to drive social innovation through Nasscom Foundation’s Nasscom Social Innovation Forum. American Express will be donating INR 1.32 Crores for these projects from its CSR budgets. Of this total grant amount, INR 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, INR 32 lakhs 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.

In partnership with American Express, IPLM will be running, ‘Technology empowering Girls’ program across 4 public libraries in the NCR region. The Public library spaces will be used to empower a minimum of 800 underserved girls from 12 – 22 years of age on new-age technology tools like mobile phones, computers, tablets, etc.

Once trained, the girls will be able to send email, connect on social media, buy from ecommerce websites, pay bills online, use maps, check whether forecast and will even learn how to use the Internet to avail various government services such as registering for Aadhar cards, ration cards, PAN cards, and others. This will also enable them to use innovative technology-based solutions to help them resolve key gender equality issues like violence, health, and economic and political empowerment. This will also encourage girls to further undertake IT education.

“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.

Shrikant Sinha, CEO, Nasscom Foundation said, “Most of the social issues can be solved using technology as an enabler but the use of technology becomes limited to the extent of tech knowledge a person has. We believe that if you train a girl, you train a generation giving them the power to become true change agents for the society. This partnership will also be giving a renewed purpose to the public libraries and we hope that more corporates come forward to help reimagine and reposition our public libraries as the centre of our community engagement.”

With support from American Express, Nasscom Social Innovation Forum would be able to provide grants worth INR 10 lakhs each to five winners across the categories - Financial Inclusion, Healthcare & Sanitation, and Environment. The remaining grant will be utilized to further build capacity, mentor and enhance the efficiencies of the winners.

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.

Applications for NSIF are open until October 31, 2017.