Vodafone Idea CSR

We at Vodafone Idea Ltd are committed to developing communities where we operate in. Our deep rooted commitment to social sector is clearly stated in our vision statement “to connect and inspire every Indian to build a better tomorrow’ and further refined in our mission statement towards community ‘Be the most respected company by leveraging technology and purposeful innovation to catalyse social prosperity, digital literacy and inclusivity’ Over the years, erstwhile Vodafone Foundation and erstwhile Idea CSR have both positively engaged with a wide variety of stakeholders such as central and state government, policy makers, civil society organizations, research academic organizations, students, media etc.

Our current portfolio focusses on Vidya (Education), Swasth (Healthcare), Aamdani (Livelihoods and Women Empowerment), and we have transformative projects in each of these domains that offer the potential to improve wellbeing of millions of Indians, while showcasing innovative use of mobile technology and development approaches.

Our ongoing programmes:

Smart Agri
Agriculture is becoming more and more knowledge intensive. Millions of food-insecure smallholder farmers in India could improve their yields, incomes and resilience if they had access to the appropriate information and knowledge to make informed choices about their farms. Acknowledging these issues the project was conceptualised to addresses these challenges related with the agriculture by bringing in use of technology to improve the agriculture productivity and socio-economic condition of the farmers.

The project aims to deliver a comprehensive solution on smart agriculture using tech-based approach to improve agriculture practices, farm yield, revenues and overall quality of life for farmers. It also aims to enhance livelihoods of around 50,000 small farmers (cotton, soya) through sustainable farming approaches and improve agriculture practices by adopting IOT based solutions through Sensors, Multilingual Application, QueryBot, Crop Disease Detection, Artificial Intelligence for data analysis. Regular training and handhold support are being provided to the farmers for adoption of tech based farming methods to increase the productivity. It also build entrepreneurs in the form of lead farmers who support a cluster of farmers through tech-enabled 100 demonstrations farm land. The initiative is for two years and is under implementation in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.

Jigyasa

Our flagship programme in the domain of Education – Jigyasa – aims to be build knowledge for life and addresses some of the most pressing concerns faced by education sector in India. It is widely known that most teachers follow traditional method of teaching which makes classrooms uninteresting and causes drop outs amongst students. Often infrastructure provided by the government is also not adequately used enough. Our intervention aims to build capacity of teachers, introduce digital content to make learning and teaching more enjoyable, and augment existing infrastructure as needed.

By introduction of digital training tools, content and innovative pedagogy, Jigyasa has helped more than 12,000 teachers, over 2 lakh students in 26 districts across five states within a year of its operations.  Jigyasa also addresses another pressing concern of the education sector – limited awareness and access to scholarships. We have also developed India’s largest multi-lingual scholarship discovery and assistance platform – www.learningwithvodafoneidea.inwhich curates information of scholarships worth more than Rs. 15,000 crore rupees. Almost 30,000 students have received scholarship – several of them for the first time – through support provided by our scholarship portal.

Health Entrepreneurs – Diagnostic Tests

Addressing Anaemia amongst school going children is a top priority of Anaemia Mukt Bharat programme under Government of India’s flagship programme on public health – Poshan Abhiyan.

Our health intervention addresses one of the biggest challenge in managing Anaemia – correct diagnosis. Using a special medical device, we are able to offer quick and easy diagnosis - with results stored in a secure cloud - which can help in identifying trends and patterns. Our initiative is driven by “health entrepreneurs” who are selected from local communities and are also able to bridge the gap between beneficiaries and care givers.

Our initiative is currently operational in 8 districts in five states and we have tested almost 2 lakh children for Anaemia so far.

Financial literacy - Jaadu Ginni Ka
Financial literacy is increasing becoming an important life skill – not just for people who want to invest – but also for people below the poverty line who are trying to decide how to balance their budgets, invest in assets such as home, livestock etc. and fund their children’s education or marriage. Recent developments such as demonetization and a greater push by the government towards an e-economy has made financial literacy and awareness important for financial survival and well-being.

The need of the hour is to provide contextual and customized financial literacy content to the target population at the bottom of pyramid so that they can also come under the ambit of financial inclusion.

Vodafone Idea CSR’s flagship programme on financial literacy – Jaadu Ginni Ka – aims to fill that gap. Jaadu Ginni Ka content is based on simple story-telling format and features many games, activities and quizzes and is available as a free download for Android in ten Indian languages.

As part of our plan to deepen engagement with end-beneficiaries, we have also launched customised mobile vans that are taking Jaadu Ginni Ka to communities in seven states.

We have positively impacted almost 1 crore people – almost half of them women – in 16 states since the programme started in 2018.

Digital Village
Our rural India faces number of issues in absence of livelihood opportunities, basic infrastructure, facilities at public institutions, awareness among people and Gram Panchayat functionaries etc. These issues become grave if the places are affected by the left wing extremism. To address these issues a comprehensive program was designed with two components one with an aim to create model village and another to provide support to rural women in setting up food supply chain system and enhance their livelihood through technology integration.

• Model Village: Human Development Index is extremely poor in imany regions especially ones impacted by Left Wing Extremism and one of these districts is Gadchiroli, Maharashtra. The project aims to create 24 model villages in Gadchiroli with aim to improve livelihood, higher productivity for the farmers, water & sanitation, education, healthcare, people participation in development activities and deliver a new model for delivery of government schemes to improve people’s lives. Special emphasis is also on the convergence of central and state government schemes. Each Gram Panchayat is provided untied fund Rs 10 lakh as Garm Kosh and dedicated Gram Parivartak who stays in the Gram Panchayat and supports Gram Panchayat functionaries in the development activities. There has been improvement of around 30% on key SDGs with respect to baseline data in these villages.
  
  
• RUDI Sandesha Vyavahar:
  In India, thousands of farmers, micro-entrepreneurs, SHG members etc. are not able to maximize returns of their business due to lack of essential management, marketing and communication skills. Acknowledging the issue and role of technology to address the project was conceptualized with objective to set up supply chain system right from procurement of goods to selling the processed agro based food products to end customers using mobile based application. RSV is an Android based Point of Sales (POS) mobile application that makes it easy for rural women (RUDIbens) -. The initiative has also developed an enterprise resource platform (ERP) that provides control over all business processes and business process owners while providing ease of access through mobile applications and user-friendly graphic user interface (GUI). It was initiated in the State of Gujarat State and expanded to Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan in the year 2019-20. 4700 SHG women have been trained on the use of RSV mobile application to sell agro food products. The project has benefitted 1.4 lakh households who are getting affordable and hygienic agro food products at their door step.

Connecting for Good
Technology is at the heart of our work. We also believe that mobile technology offers an unprecedented opportunity to address global challenges of sustainable development. To help civil society organizations, NGOs, CBOs etc. increase impact of their work, we have a special initiative called Connecting for Good where we provide them with requisite technology support through grants.

We have also developed India’s first crowdsourcing platform – www.socialapphub.com - that curates mobile solutions with social impact. The Hub currently features over 700 apps and offers a plethora of knowledge: articles, latest news trends, interviews and case studies on how mobile technology has created impact at the grass-root level.

Vodafone Idea Student Scholarships and Teachers’ Award
To help students overcome financial constraints in their quest for education, Vodafone Idea CSR launched a dedicated scholarship programme for deserving students where we envision to provide them education-related expenses such as books, reference material etc.

Additionally, Vodafone Idea has also instituted Teacher’s Award to acknowledge Mathematics and Science teachers that have demonstrated exemplary teaching methodologies to make learning more enjoyable.

Other Programmes

Swachh Iconic Place, Shree Somnath Temple under Swachh Bharat Mission:
The project supplements the Government of India’s initiative to enhance cleanliness across India’s rich heritage sites. It aims to create and support infrastructure to enhance cleanliness in Somnath Temple complex and in its periphery areas and create awareness among the people about cleanliness.  During the year various activities were undertaken at Shree Somnath Temple and on its peripheries and in the approach areas by construction of e-Toilets, deployment of heavy duty road sweeper machine, sewerage cleaning machine, installation of LED display boards for displaying information to create awareness about cleanliness amongst visitors, deployment of computer education bus “School on Wheels” to facilitate training to children and women on digital literacy.

Girl Child Education – Vidya Har Beti ka Adhikar:
A flagship program of the erstwhile Idea Cellular Ltd., aims to improve learning environment in the government schools by promoting digital and joyful learning.  During the year the project was implemented in Sitamarhi, Bihar across three Government schools. Key activities taken under the project are setting up digital learning infrastructure, capacity building of teachers on the use of digital content and activity based learning, white wash and repair of school buildings, classroom furniture, water and sanitation facilities, sports facilities etc. Under the project ICT room has also been set up in these schools equipped with LED television, Tablets preloaded with digital content and proper sitting infrastructure. It has helped students to learn using digital medium and has also built the capacity of teachers on teaching pedagogies.