Pollinate Group

In India, 65 million people live in informal settlement communities in extreme poverty without access to electricity and running water. Women in these communities bear the brunt of poverty as they are denied access to employment opportunities and digital technology that could improve their lives.

Pollinate Group aims to address both the digital and gender divides by providing underserved women with entrepreneurial skills, mentoring and digital tools to enable them to run their own businesses.  When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Pollinate Group launched two digital solutions- a Learning Management System and a mobile sales application- providing our entrepreneurs with first-time access to digital tools to learn and make sales safely throughout the pandemic. We now aim to expand this solution to reach 10,000 women across India by 2025, and believe it could be scaled globally to provide a sustainable pathway for all women to move out of extreme poverty.

Through the Digital Workforce Challenge, Pollinate Group seeks to address the lack of access to digital technologies and skills for unserved women in India to adapt their businesses to a low-touch economy.

Globally, 689 million people live in extreme poverty on less than $1.90 a day. In India, 65 million in extreme poverty live in informal settlement communities without access to electricity, clean water, or reliable communication (World Bank, 2020). Women living in these communities bear the brunt of poverty, as they are often denied access to training, employment opportunities and digital technology that could improve their lives. Pollinate Group is one of the few organisations working to address the needs of people in these communities.

In 2020, Pollinate Group’s own research showed that 54% of our women entrepreneurs did not have access to smartphones or know how to use them. This digital gap was exacerbated during the COVID-19 nationwide extended lockdowns in 2020, as our women entrepreneurs did not have the means to pivot their sales businesses online. We responded to this challenge by launching two digital solutions to equip our women entrepreneurs with the digital tools and skills they needed to adapt to a new, low-touch economy.

Our solution involves rolling out two digital innovations (a Learning Management System (LMS) and a mobile sales application) across our women entrepreneurship network to enable our entrepreneurs to learn and make sales more safely during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Our LMS was built using Tech Stack software and is maintained on database servers provided by our partner Purple Quay. The LMS enables our women entrepreneurs to access entrepreneurship training and product demonstration videos any time, and any number of times via a smartphone using a simple web link. Our LMS has an evaluation component to assess our women entrepreneurs’ understanding of each topic and also captures the analytics of which entrepreneurs have accessed the videos.

Our mobile sales application was developed in partnership with Accenture and enables our women entrepreneurs to make cashless transactions, manage their product inventory, view outstanding credit, and manage their customers. It is tailored to the digital literacy levels of our women entrepreneurs (many of whom have never accessed a smartphone before) by offering several features such as speech to text and visual icons to overcome literacy and comprehension barriers. The app uses Salesforce as its back-end which captures all sales data.

Both of our digital solutions serve women from our entrepreneurship network in India. These women live in urban and peri-urban informal settlement communities across four states in India (West Bengal, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Telangana) in temporary tent shelters without access to running water, electricity and reliable forms of communication. The majority of these women have migrated with their families from rural parts of India in search of a better source of income. Due to their perceived transience, lack of land ownership and low literacy levels, no other development agencies or government services are available to these women.

Pollinate Group is working with these women to provide them with the skills, access to digital technology and support they need to earn a dignified and stable source of income through entrepreneurship. A recent baseline survey undertaken by Pollinate Group in 2020 showed that only 54% of women in the communities in which we work have access to a smartphone. With low rates of digital literacy and access to digital technology, our women entrepreneurs have been left behind by the growing digital revolution across the globe.

In order to equip our women entrepreneurs with the skills and resources they need to thrive in an increasingly digital world, Pollinate Group decided to develop a Learning Management System and mobile sales application to enable them to learn and make sales more effectively in their communities. Both of our solutions were designed taking into account the specific needs of our women entrepreneurs and have undergone intensive testing and piloting within our entrepreneurship network. For example, given the low levels of literacy in the communities in which we work, the LMS is open source and easily accessible through the click of a button to our entrepreneurs. All content is delivered via video in the local languages of our entrepreneurs.  The LMS will enable our women entrepreneurs for the first time to access training any time and any number of times and facilitate their ongoing access to training during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and associated restrictions.

Our mobile application is pictographic in nature and uses culturally relevant symbols and images that are easily understandable by our women entrepreneurs. The app also contains features such as speech to text to support women entrepreneurs who have limited literacy levels. Through the app, our women entrepreneurs will be able to better visualise their sales revenue, manage their product inventory, make cashless transactions and keep track of their customers.

Our team of experienced field staff will provide ongoing mentoring, training and support to our entrepreneurs on a 1:1 basis to enable them to effectively use both the LMS and the application until they reach independence.

Both our solutions will be life-changing for our women entrepreneurs. Not only will these solutions enable our entrepreneurs to access digital technology for the first time they will also be able to enhance both their learning and the reach of their important work. This will result in our women entrepreneurs being equipped to make more sales, increase their income and reach even more people from underserved communities in India with access to life-changing clean energy and household products.

Pollinate Group is addressing the lack of access to digital skills and technology among women from India’s most marginalised communities through this project by providing these women with free access to digital skills, training and tools for the first time to expand the impact of their businesses. By focusing on skills development and the provision of digital access for disadvantaged women, our solution strongly aligns with two key dimensions of the Digital Workforce Challenge: preparing those entering/ already in the workforce with affordable digital skills and training; and providing more equitable access to the digital workforce to those lacking connectivity.

We have selected the “growth” stage as we have already piloted the use of digital innovations (our Learning Management System and mobile sales application) with 40-50 women entrepreneurs in our network across the six cities in which we work in India in 2021. Now, we are looking to further expand our digital offerings across our women entrepreneur network with the aim of all new and existing women entrepreneurs (1000+) in our network with smartphones being on boarded onto, and effectively using, our Learning Management System and Mobile sales application by the end of 2022. 

Both our mobile application and LMS platform are innovative as they have been designed to specifically address the access barriers preventing illiterate women from marginalised communities from accessing existing digital technology.

For example, our mobile application is pictographic and has voice-to-text features in six languages to enable our women entrepreneurs from all our areas of operation across India to access and use the application easily. Additionally, our mobile application provides a means for our entrepreneurs to visualise, and keep track of, their customers, income and product inventory for the first time, increasing the ease and efficiency with which they can do business. We believe that the income tracking feature will enable our entrepreneurs to better understand their earning potential and motivate them to further increase their income.

Our LMS also provides easy access to training and product videos for our entrepreneurs through the click of a link. These videos which have been developed and designed in our entrepreneurs' local languages and provide them with any time access to training for the first time.

Both our LMS and mobile application have the potential to be catalytic. As we scale and expand our work, we will work with partner organisations to introduce these technologies to more and more women in India which enable hundreds of thousands of women to obtain the digital and business skills, and access to technology they need to earn a stable livelihood and move out of extreme poverty over the longer-term. 

Both our solutions use existing technologies. Our LMS uses open source technology and was built using Tech Stack software and is maintained on database servers provided by our vendor and partner Purple Quay in India. It uses asp.net as its core technology.

Our mobile sales application was developed using open source technology in partnership with Accenture using REACT Native for its user interface. The app uses Salesforce as its back-end which enables the capture of all sales data directly to the cloud and also integrates digital payment technology.

Both the technologies used in our LMS and mobile application are open-source and used and accepted globally. The digital payment technology in our mobile application has been developed by our vendors and is widely used by a range of other organisations in India. The technology used for our LMS (asp.net) has been developed by our vendor Purple Quay and is also currently being utilised by a number of Purple Quay's partners across India and globally.

A link to a demo of our app is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c1gjlXxabszCC-q0W_4h9a_CnDkkDvsc/view?usp=sharing

Pollinate Group has identified following risks and mitigation strategies associated with the introduction of the LMS and mobile application into our women entrepreneurship network. 

• Lack of security when signing into the LMS and app: To mitigate against potential security risks, Pollinate Group has developed unique login credentials for each user and a two factor authentication system (requiring a one time pin).

• Data privacy: Pollinate Group has a Privacy Policy which outlines our commitment to the ethical storage, use and capture of both women entrepreneurs’ and customers' data. All Pollinate Group staff and partners will be trained on this policy as the organisation scales its solution.

• Entrepreneurs not receiving consent from customers to take their photo: As the mobile application requires our women entrepreneurs to take photos of their customers, Pollinate Group will provide training to all our new and existing women entrepreneurs on consent to ensure that consent from customers is taken prior to the use of customers’ photos on our mobile application.

• Women entrepreneurs not having access to smartphones or reliable internet: To mitigate against this risk, Pollinate Group will initiate an incentive program to provide smartphones to entrepreneurs who earn a revenue of 100,000 INR over four consecutive months. Smartphones will be procured from reputable vendors and funded from grants or in-kind donations as we scale. We will also incorporate an offline mode feature into our app which will enable the app to be used offline and sales data to be synchronized once the device comes online.

Our solution currently serves 350 women entrepreneurs. In one year, we expect to serve 1,400 women entrepreneurs and in five years we expect to serve 10,000 women entrepreneurs.

Over the next five years, Pollinate Group plans to transition our successful and proven women entrepreneurship model to scale to reach 10,000 women with the skills, training and access to digital technology they need to become successful entrepreneurs who can improve the living conditions of their families.

We will do this through two innovative approaches. Firstly, we will add a new digital training platform and sales management application to our offering for women entrepreneurs to enable them to leverage digital technology to access training content any time, increase their sales, better manage their inventory, and make cashless transactions to customers. Secondly, we will partner with local NGOs to recruit more women into our network from communities in order to scale our women entrepreneurship model across India. 

Our five-year goals:

• Create jobs for 10,000 women from marginalised communities (1,400 in 2022); 

• Provide 10,000 women with basic product training, sales and marketing training, digital and financial literacy awareness, and access to digital technology to become successful entrepreneurs (1,400 in 2022); 

• Expand our networks into new rural and peri-urban districts in India and Nepal leveraging our regional presence across Karnataka, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh,West Bengal in India, and Chitwan, Bardiya and Kailali in Nepal; and 

• Positively impact the lives of 10 million people living on less than 1.90 USD per day through the sale of 1.5 million clean energy and household products, enabling them to save time, save money and improve their health over the long term (570,000 people and 85,000 products in 2022).

Pollinate Group is measuring progress on achieving our goals by measuring the following KPIs:

• # of jobs created for women

• # of entrepreneurs with access to smartphones

• # of entrepreneurs trained on using the mobile application and LMS

• # of  entrepreneurs trained in digital and financial literacy

• # of entrepreneurs with increased income 

• # of cashless payments completed through the mobile application 

• # of clean energy products sold 

Full time staff: 60

Pollinate Group’s staff consists of individuals from rural and urban areas in India, Nepal and Australia with backgrounds in the not for profit, social entrepreneurship and corporate sectors. These individuals have been with the organization for over two years and bring the knowledge, experience, drive and skillset to enable them to successfully execute our scaling strategy.  

Our CEO has a background with startups and is committed to adopting the rigour of the corporate sector to solve challenges within the social sector. Our Director of Impact comes from one of the communities in which we work in Nepal and has extensive experience developing and scaling women-led enterprises in over 12 districts in Nepal. Additionally, our Directors of Operations, People and Culture, Finance and Technology all have experience implementing business systems, processes and strategies at scale in either the not for profit or corporate sectors.

Our teams in India and Nepal comprise of individuals from a diverse range of backgrounds and regions. We have actively and strategically recruited Area Managers and Field Mobilizers in India and Nepal who come directly from the communities in which we work. These staff understand first hand the challenges and barriers faced by our women entrepreneurs which makes them well placed to provide our entrepreneurs with the support, mentorship and tailored training they need to build their skills and gain the confidence they need to achieve success in their entrepreneurial journeys.

Pollinate Group’s Board, staff and volunteers consist of individuals from a diverse range of ages, cultures, and professional backgrounds. We are committed to adopting a diverse and inclusive approach to recruiting talent into our Board and Executive team.

Our management team consists of 9 individuals from a diverse range of backgrounds, ages, ethnicities and genders. For example, our Indian female CEO has over 20 years experience in the corporate sector, while our Director of Impact is from rural Nepal and has extensive experience training and supporting rural women entrepreneurs to independently run their own businesses.

Recently, Pollinate Group expanded our Board of Directors from 5 to 9 members to increase gender representation and diversity within the Board. Recognising that our existing Board, while diverse in terms of gender, ability and skills, did not adequately represent the diversity of the communities in which we work. For these reasons, we made a concerted effort to identify and recruit more women and people of colour onto our Board and successfully recruited three people of colour onto the board, two of whom were women.

Pollinate Group has also recently developed and rolled out policies on Disability and Gender and Inclusion across our organisation to raise awareness about the needs of women and people with disability and to equip staff with the skills and knowledge to be able to successfully address barriers preventing marginalised women and people with disability from fully participating in our work.

We are applying to the 2021 Digital Workforce Challenge as we would value the opportunity that winning the challenge would give us to not only gain the vital funding we need to further scale our important solution across India to reach thousands of more women with access to digital skills and technology, but also raise the profile of our organisation globally. 

As a potential barrier to the success of our solution is a lack of funding to resource our scaling plans, we believe that willing this challenge would provide us with not only immediate funding, but raise our profile and ability to secure further funding to scale our solution to reach many millions more women living in extreme poverty over the next five years.

We also believe that winning the challenge would enable us to overcome the technological and human resource barriers which could affect the scaling of our solution. Winning the challenge could enable us to connect with other like-minded organisations in the MIT community with whom we could partner with to recruit, identify and train more women into our entrepreneur network. We also would benefit from connecting with technological partners in the MIT Community with whom we could work to further improve and enhance our technological solutions to increase the usability and accessibility of our LMS and mobile application for women from marginalised communities.

Pollinate Group has been working in India since 2012. We currently operate in the states of Karnataka (in Bangalore and Tumkur), West Bengal (in Kolkata and the Sundarbans), Uttar Pradesh (in Lucknow, Kanpur and Nigohi) and in Telangana (in Hyderabad). In all of these locations, we have an established presence and team of local staff who have built solid, trusting relationships with the local communities with which we work.

We are looking to expand our work across these states over the next 4-5 years as we scale and grow our operations.

Pollinate Group's main goal is to establish partnerships with local organisations in India in order to expand our women entrepreneurship model into more urban, peri-urban and rural communities across India. Our ultimate goal is to reach 10,000 women entrepreneurs with the tools, technology and resources they need to become successful entrepreneurs by 2025.

While we have already started to expand our work into new locations with the support of local partners, this work has only just begun and we have a long way to go to achieve our long-term goals. We require further support to identify and build relationships with other like-minded partners in India to expand our work.

Another key priority for Pollinate Group is establishing partnerships with corporate organisations that could provide us with pro bono support to improve our brand visibility, support our technology team to continuously improve and enhance our LMS and mobile app technology and our website, and to digitalise our data collection methods. We would appreciate support in identifying and connecting to partners who would support us in these areas.

We would like to partner with organisations such as Salesforce, Google and Amazon Web Services. We are currently using the services of these companies but would like to collaborate further with these organisations to understand how we can further leverage their services and technologies to improve the impact and efficiency of our work.