Project Tech4Dev / Dasra (applying for Glific)

The problem I am trying to solve with my team sits at the centre of the social impact sector. We want to change the way most NGOs deliver their program - to include digital & physical. Education at home, equity in employment opportunities and resources, youth empowerment programs, healthcare, needs to be more digital friendly. COVID crisis has further exposed the gap in  To be able to disrupt the program delivery paradigm through efficient tools that can be applied at scale, we need the focus and attention of the NGOs. Some of the NGOs have already started realising the challenges in the last mile delivery of their programs and are adopting our solution, we we need to reach a lot more NGOs and help them do the same.
To make a large scale impact on the lives of vulnerable communities, we need to partner with NGOs and supplement them with ready to deploy tech solutions that further increase the impact of their programming. Elevate Prize will give our solution a stage for all NGOs to hear from, along with capital to support product development and NGO programs through training and operational costs.

We envision a world where access to cheap phones and data gives a chance for the bottom rung of the pyramid to connect with reliable sources for opportunities rather than the oppressive forces. It could be a significant leap out of marginality for communities from diverse backgrounds and low-income strata. We would have contributed to tipping the solutions and services of NGOs to millions of lives through simple exchange of messages.

I have worked with 15+ NGOs at the intersection of design & technology in the past 6 years, since I left college, to solve various challenges to increase their impact. Other team members like Donald Lobo brings even more experience and connection with NGOs to be able to build our solution effectively.

Our goals by end of 2021 are to serve:

• 40 medium sized NGOs with avg. reach of 10K users (= 400K users)
• 4 mid to large NGOs with an avg. reach of 100K users (= 400K users)
• Go beyond India, first to South Asia and then the rest of the world

We hope to reach 750K to 1M beneficiaries by the end of 2021.

There are 3.2 million NGOs in India(10M globally), engaging with millions of lives for the last mile delivery of resources & services, the situation has been made worse due to COVID-19. The previous linkages that connected NGOs with their community have been broken and need rethinking. Some NGOs like Slam out Loud, Saajha, Dost Education and many others looked for alternative ways to reach their community to continue their education & livelihood programs during the tough times when physical means were out of question. They weren't able to:

• Respond to their diverse community effectively in a timely manner & get feedback
• Collect data, analyse interactions to understand the community needs through better visualisation methods
• Ensure their communities had access to opportunities & information at the right time

We recognise that mobile phones & data are getting cheaper. We want to solve the problem of NGOs’ program delivery with an open source, two-way communication platform, Glific, built on WhatsApp Business API that NGOs use to engage with their beneficiaries, distribute content, provide useful information through personalised 1-2-1 conversations at a large scale. Chat based engagement methods allow for meaningful connectivity that uplifts.

Communication tools like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal have a penetrating reach in the Global South and many NGOs were able to utilise it to support their communities during the pandemic to a fair degree of impact through meaningful connectivity. And we are looking to disrupt the communication paradigm to enable millions of people gain access to resources, opportunities and information at the right time, from reliable, social good organisations.

Glific uses a combination of automation and manual processes to enable NGOs to easily scale to thousands of conversations a day with few staff. Glific also integrates with Google BigQuery & DataStudio so NGOs can collect data, analyze their interactions, see the people’s pain points, and visualise & measure their impact.

Our approach involves:

• making it easy for NGOs to manage thousands of conversations & beneficiary needs, 

• building multilingual support to power engagement with their diverse communities,

• providing analytics and report generation support for better learning about their impact,

• integrating advanced technology such as ML and AI to reach greater scale when needed,

• improving content delivery mechanisms with images, videos, audio etc…

• improved support for research, surveys, data collection even in challenging environments

• enabling rich geographic understanding of their communities

Our solution improves the lives of the NGOs by making it much easier and faster to launch their programs for their vulnerable communities affected by complex social structures that affect inequity such as low-income, mindsets, racial & gender divides etc… 

The lives belonging to the bottom of the pyramid will find greater access to employment and livelihood opportunities, education, healthcare and social justice via the programs run by our NGO partners.

We have been able to onboard 21 NGOs who have reached approximately 80,000 beneficiaries and 1.5 million messages exchanged with them through Glific. These NGOs are running programs in various domains such as citizen mobilisation, overcoming gender and mental health issues among adolescents from low-income families, educating children in arts, coding and other curriculum as India and the world is going through one of toughest times.