NEW DELHI: Some Facts, In India, 93% of the 26 Crore Indian student population is not aware of the multitude of scholarship programs at their disposal. Every year, the Government of India and the CSR wing together launch scholarships worth 16,000 crores rupees in India. There are many students from the BOP who are unable to fulfil their dreams and ambition because of lack of financial assistance.
Clearly, the need of the hour is a tool that bridges this gap and reaches out to the thousands of deserving students so that they don’t miss out on these scholarships. That’s exactly what Buddy4Study’s vision is – to empower education and to be a pioneer in promoting scholarship awareness.
In its six years of operation so far, Buddy4study has managed to help as many as 21000 students through its innovative scholarship search engine. In total, Rupees 24 Crore Scholarship Funds have been disbursed through Buddy4Study’s transactional platform. With Buddy4Study, 85-90 % of the allocated CSR Budget gets disbursed into the scholar’s fund. Now that’s no mean feat for a startup which remained bootstrapped for a long time. What’s more gratifying is the fact that a major chunk of these 21000 consist of people from BOPs – the underprivileged – who have been given wings to fly and fulfil their dreams through Buddy4Study’s various services.
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“You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down.” – Steve Jobs had quoted once. The core founding team of Buddy4Study, comprising of Ashutosh Burnwal (CEO & Co-founder), Manasvi Singh (Co-founder & CMO), Manjeet Singh (CTO), Rajkishor Chaudhary (Tech Co-founder and Anirban Chatterjee (COO) have imbibed that philosophy by their clearly defined vision and a concise action plan to solve a grassroot level problem that has been haunting India for decades.
Budy4Study offers three main services to increase scholarship awareness and ensuring last mile delivery to students from rural areas. They are also working with Government of India under National Digital Literacy Mission where 2.37 lakhs Village Level Entrepreneurs help the rural youngsters in applying for various available scholarships through bootcamps and offline and online promotion channel. The other clients of Buddy4Study include the likes of Tata Trust, L’Oréal, HUL, Microsoft, Fair & Lovely, Marubeni, and many others.
The USP of Buddy4Study is their advanced technology driven platform backed by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. SMS (Scholarship Management Service) is an end to end product which helps the clients to design, launch, track, and review Scholarships. SMP (Student Management Panel) helps to match a large pool of students from a University or a region against the data base of Scholarships based on the eligibility criteria defined, in just a fraction of seconds. STS (Scholarship Tracking System) helps Universities and clients in tracking the entire scholarship process – they can now track the grades and money disbursed to their students, and have an option of providing them mentorship, thereby making the entire ecosystem 100% transparent.
S2S (Students to Scholar) is an innovative approach that can benefit students at a localized focal point. The impact ratio is marginally high in S2S – as the objective, demography and proposed timeline are clearly defined upfront. This leads to cost effectiveness and 100% conversion ratio.
The journey has so far been a rather win-win one. The clients have been more than happy – their operational cost gets reduced by 75 to 80% when they partner with Buddy4Study. The icing on the cake is the promotional outreach that their projects receive free of cost – with 5 crore prints per month on several National Daily Newspapers, besides having an equally eclectic outreach through regional Radio Networks and Digital Media. This helps the scholarship programs of the respective CSR Wing in attracting a larger bandwidth of applications.
The biggest benefit, however, for the clients is the highly customizable platform that Buddy4Study provides for monitoring and evaluating the impact that the project creates. The entire dashboard, with visual charts and automated reports are created for the client to assess the impact. They are also given an option to track the career growth of their students, even after they have received the scholarships. This creates a relatively long term and personal bond between the scholarship provider and the students.
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“We believe in painkillers, not vitamins,” – is the motto of the company.
Buddy4Study has been adaptable to the entire roadmap of education services, and constantly thrives to bring in new cutting edge products and services to expand its horizon. It has had a tangible success in terms of awards – The Manthan Award (Winner of e-learning category of Asia Pacific), Nasscom Award (Top 50 most innovative IT company), TOP 10 Social Enterprise by Action for India and the Capgemi Award for TOP 10 Tech Innovative Companies of the World in the Education vertical.
With such an impressive track record, Buddy4Study is not only here to stay, but also to conquer and challenge the status quo.
(India CSR)
