Lend A Hand India aims to integrate vocational education with mainstream education at secondary and higher secondary level. During Grade 9/10, LAHI expose students to multiple skills in a gender agnostic manner and during class 11-12, LAHI expose the students to the world of work by providing 80 hours of internship in small and micro enterprises across different sectors. Students intern in enterprises like retail business, auto workshop, restaurants, electrical repair shops, financial services, bakeries and primary health care centers.
Lend A Hand India is working with over 10 Lakh Students 12,000+ schools in 24 states. Out of which 10,000 students of class 11-12 were provided Internship opportunities this academic year.
Creating a Modular, Scalable Program for Students Internships and Empowering Students with Relevant Data on Opportunities
Key Business Problem:
Lakhs of students undergo vocational training across India. With increasing partnerships with different states, Lend-A-Hand India was facing following challenges:
- Identifying and tracking Employers and Opportunities
- Monitoring and Managing the program Health and Operations across States and schools
- Ensuring Quality, Trends, Data Analysis and Reports.
- Digital repository of Students works and experiences.
Our Solution – Pathways app
Koita Foundation worked with Lend a Hand India to develop a mobile based application and WhatsApp chatbot to track student's internship journey, to allow students to select their interest fields, displays relevant internship opportunities, allows students to apply for internships, view the status and share their achievements /progress on various social media channels.
The solution provided Lend a Hand India with a platform to engage and interact with students directly which led to increased proactivity within students in taking responsibility for their careers. Lend a Hand India team was also able to improve monitoring and control of internships at scale, nationally. The tool enabled the vocational trainers to keep track of activities of their students and take data-based decision which in turn increased program effectiveness and efficiency.
As we started working on the mobile solution to manage internship project for Lend A Hand India, we got introduced to Koita Foundation. I am very glad that we started working together right from the conceptualization stage as both Rekha and Rizwan have had so much to contribute to our design and development thought process. We have rarely seen a foundation getting so involved in the nitty gritty of implementation.
With the founders’ unique background of running a tech based healthcare company, we benefited of their immense insights about scaling the solution, the critical tech components required for the same and most importantly the discipline of keeping the user (intern in our case) at the center of our thought process.
As Lend A Hand India is making significant investment on the technology front, we are looking forward to strong partnership with Koita Foundation.
Mr. Raj Gilda
Co-founder & Director (Strategy and Business Development), Lend A Hand India