Technology presents us with unlimited opportunities to reimagine the world as we know it- bringing innovation into our daily lives, enabling access to products and services to name a few. But above all, it has the power to help us solve for societal and environmental challenges. This form of social innovation has the ability to drive positive impact and enable community wide change.
In recent years, India has been thriving in this space backed by favourable government policies and initiatives. However, small and mid-sized organisations lack capabilities and are unable to adopt digital on account of either lack of awareness, tools or resources.
Without a doubt, the recent health event has disrupted many industries including education. India’s education system was compelled to go virtual and digital overnight which was not an easy task. This left an education gap in our economy affecting 320 million learners in India1. While the industry has been quick to revive and adapt itself to the new normal, there is still scope for improvement.
United Way of Chennai (UWC), a global non-profit is one such organization which was impacted by the digital divide. They help provide health and sanitation, primary & secondary education, income & livelihood generation, and support people with disabilities.
Data collation and storage at UWC followed the traditional manual process of filling excel sheets which also included collation of student sponsorship information. The task over time became tedious and with controls in place, authenticity and validity of the data was also compromised.
As a solution to this challenge, PayPal engineers teamed up to formulate a real time forum that provided updated information to all stakeholders. The tech-enabled platform allows UWC to store student details and sponsorship information in an efficient manner, while sponsors are also able to easily access details of students, they wish to offer sponsorships to or are associated with. Apart from this, the application was designed in a manner to display essential student information to its members.
The engineers developed a simple, robust, and mobile responsive application with role-based experience to meet the needs of both non-profit and donor. The platform delivers curated experiences, allowing its users access to view/search/modify information. Additionally, the non-profit also benefits from an analytics dashboard which monitors the overall progress of the program.
App: https://portal.unitedwaychennai.org/
Meet the team:
