Bengaluru, Karnataka, India:  Nourishing Schools Foundation, a non-profit focused on helping children take charge of tackling malnutrition, has been selected for the Social Innovation Catalyst program. This program, a joint initiative of NASSCOM Foundation’s corporate volunteering program - My Kartavya and Tietoevry, aims at strengthening the NGO ecosystem by mentoring select non-profits to overcome tech challenges for a lasting impact.
 
Adolescents in India face several nutrition-related challenges and due to a lack of data, their health and nutrition are often overlooked. Through the Social Innovation Catalyst program, NASSCOM Foundation will support Nourishing Schools Foundation in building a Data Hub on adolescent health and nutrition. This will improve various stakeholders’ understanding of adolescent health and nutrition, enable them to compare data across geographies and themes​, and suggest priority areas of action.
 
Archana Sinha, CEO, and Co-founder, Nourishing Schools Foundation said, “We have collected over 13,000 responses from children aged between 9 to 16 years in the course of our work, related to various parameters of their health and nutrition. We expect this number to exceed 22,000 by the end of the year. As a part of the catalyst, we were paired with a mentor from Tietoevry. He helped us develop a data privacy policy and understand processes for ensuring data security and privacy. This will help us establish trust and credibility with stakeholders such as government departments, other NGOs, academic institutions, and the general public as we share our data-based insights with them. These insights could inform their policies, programs and research. We are grateful for the support provided to us through the Social Innovation Catalyst program.”

Sharing about the My Kartavya, volunteering program, Nidhi Bhasin, CEO, NASSCOM Foundation said, “India’s social sector has always been a vibrant one with over 3.17 million registered non-profits working across different fields. However, capacity building, especially aided by technology has forever remained a challenge in this sector. Creating an enabling ecosystem for India’s social sector, is a critical factor that will decide how quickly we can scale social transformation initiatives and that’s the focus of our TechForGood programs. Under that umbrella, the Social Catalyst Innovation initiative in partnership with Tietoevry has shown that mentorship and support can go a long way in delivering lasting impact at scale.”