NEW DELHI: NASSCOM Foundation today announced its 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 Crores 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 and Sanitation, and Environment.
The remaining, Rs 32 lakhs will be utilized under 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 4 libraries, catering to a minimum 200 adolescent girls each year, per library.
“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, “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.”
NASSCOM Social Innovation Forum (NSIF) is platform to foster innovative use of technology to create sustained social impact.
With support from American Express, Forum would be able to provide grants worth Rs 10 lakhs each to five winners across the categories – Financial Inclusion, Healthcare and Sanitation, and Environment.
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 Foundation network of tech for good leaders in the country.
Applications for NSIF are open until 31st October, 2017.
