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A #BetterFuture with #BetterBhavishya

Better Bhavishya
Better Bhavishya

While this forum is usually used for talking about innovative approaches of ZMOTly, we will share in this post about one of the exciting things we do at Futureshift in the area of social impact.

At Futureshift, we work on creating impact at the intersection of technology and strategy.

This translates into frameworks, innovative products and solutions that solve real issues in the business and social sector. The outcome is about creating a sustainable and lasting impact.

In business scenarios, ZMOTly provides the frameworks for success and Futrlabs offers solutions and products to achieve the delivered outcome.

In the social sector space, a segment that we are passionate about, we have a pillar called Better Bhavishya (better future). We leverage the skills in consulting and global experiences to be a change-maker in our little way.

At #BetterBhavishya, we work in the social sector space leading with ZMOTly impact framework and with products from Futrlabs that can help them achieve their goals faster. They are either continuous long-term partnerships or one-time engagements.

Better Bhavishya’ s works on these four areas – education, healthcare, environment and human rights.

  • As technology partners with an International Human Rights NGO, we helped them on some of their very key projects.
    • An Indian healthcare authority worked on a prototype and delivery mechanism for vaccination alerts that would help them prevent one million deaths and over 950,000 preventable disability each year.
    • Together with the NGO and a government ministry, worked on the prevention of bullying in schools.
    • Together with the human rights organisation, worked on jail reforms to reduce the number of undertrials held illegally in prisons.
  • Engaged with an NGO, funded by one of India’s reputed philanthropic foundation, for improving literacy and numerous is amongst children with low-income parents.
  • With another substantial philanthropic foundation, we developed a project impact assessment framework and helped in some other charitable initiatives.
  • For a not-for-profit working on building a community for parents of autistic children, worked on developing a strategy and reach.
  • At an NGO in Hyderabad, worked on developing a content and delivery framework and roll-out for long-term education for underprivileged children in the Andhra Pradesh and Telangana region.
  • In a village in Tamilnadu, have taken an initiative to convert 500,000 sft of barren land with an agroforest with over 15,000 trees.

Our founder’s prior experience in driving the Unlimited Potential initiative for Microsoft Asia Pacific plays an essential role in recommendations for our clients. The Unlimited Potential initiative was the outcome of Bill Gates vision to enable sustained social and economic opportunity for the following 5 billion people. The strategy was to reach incremental 1 billion people by 2015 by expanding deeper down the economic pyramid in a sustainable fashion by building non-traditional partnerships, breakthrough technologies and business models. The focus was on education, fostering innovation and creating jobs and opportunities through relevance, access and affordability. Bring one of the first employees in Asia-Pacific, driving that initiative has helped significantly in structure and systematising our approach better bhavishya projects at Futureshift.

Currently, we are working on a big idea that can transform hundreds of millions of rural lives by increasing local entrepreneurship opportunities and agriculture productivity. The core philosophy is to create local micro-innovations and income that would bubble up to have access to better education and healthcare opportunities.

This would more almost double the farm output and will dramatically transform the lives of rural India, where 70% of the Indian populations reside. We expect this to be a $1 billion+ social entrepreneurship business by 2022, creating an ecosystem with 10x more economic activity.

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ZMOTly Impact – Pados App to Aid Nepal Relief, Reconstruction

When we heard of the massive catastrophic earthquake in Nepal and the death and destruction we started charting ways in which we can help in the relief work using technology.

Pados (www.padosapp.com)

Pados is mobile messenger service app and coincidentally named the Hindi word for Neighbourhood.

We started ensuring that we added all the 916 Neighbourhoods or Chimekas as they call in Nepal and that covers 100% of Nepal’s neighbourhoods. For example, this app has already created open group for Residents of Darchula, Darchula District, Nepal, bearing Pincode 10100 all the way up to Hangpang, Taplejung District, Nepal, bearing Pincode 57512.

This app will help the communities to rapidly rebuild themselves as logical online groups in less than 60 seconds and engage with conversations relevant to the members and survivors. The local officials, police and rescuers can also easily join the community where they are involved in and start having discussions that will aid relief and reconstruction work. Tens of Thousands of ground volunteers from India across the world, as well as NDRF are engaged in massive search and rescue operations. With the drawing of the end of rescue efforts, the community forum can be used for reconstruction, rehabilitation and logistics of the aid pouring in from rest of the world.

In fact, the community or teams
can easily create further communities or groups and start conversing in less
than 60 seconds. For example, the NDRF team working in Kesharpur can easily
create a private group called +NDRF_Kesharpur_OperationMAITRI that can involve
their ground teams as well as coordinating officers back in New Delhi or
elsewhere.

Any member can simply sign-up using popular social networking services like Facebook or Google+ or Twitter.  With Pados, the user can receive instant
messages from the community even if both of them are not connected with them on social media or phone contacts.

The service will use standard data networks like 2G/3G or Wi-Fi, and does not need to involve expensive SMS charges and messages can crisscross across continents, between mobile phones and tablets that help coordinating specific relief operations.

Pados is available for Android phones and tablets and is downloadable FREE on Google Play Store.  It is estimated that Android constituters over 90% of smartphone market in Nepal. – Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pados

We hope that we can make a difference in our own way to the relief and reconstruction efforts.

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#ZMOTlyIImpact – 150,000 Indian Neighbourhoods and counting.

Yes, you heard it right. We are happy to share with you that over 150,000 Indian Neighborurhoods are on Pados Community Network. Just type in your pincode and you can chose the neighbourhood you want to be part of.

Alternatively, you can add create your own community and invite your neighbours. Get Creative.

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#Pados, a Private Social Network for your Neighborhood

We are excited to talk to you
today about Pados, the first private social network for the neighbourhood.

We are a relatively new entity that sits at the intersection of
two large and important trends in our industry: social and local.   Over the next few posts, we will show you
the actual app and its uses in real neighbourhoods.

First, a little bit about what inspired the idea and why we
think it is such a meaningful opportunity.

Therefore, we all know that social networks have become
ubiquitous and mainstream. They have enormous user bases, over 2 billion users of Internet using Internet
in one way or other. It is clear that we have begun to rely on social networks
for almost all parts of our lives. We rely on Facebook to keep us connected to
friends and family. We rely on Twitter to follow topics and people that
interest us. In addition, we rely on LinkedIn to manage our professional
identities.

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It turns out that the neighbourhood is one of the original
social networks. There is a large body of research, led by Harvard
Professor Robert Putnam that shows the tangible benefits of having a social
network in a neighbourhood. What is interesting about Putnam’s quote here is
that it is from the year 2002. Therefore, he is not talking about the online
social networks that have become mainstream today. He is talking about the
real world connections that we have with our neighbours, in our neighbourhoods.

Unfortunately, we seem to have lost touch with the neighbourhood. We
estimate that less than 1 in 10 Indians know their neighbours and less than 28%
know none of their neighbours by name. While there are plenty of online
services that can connect us to people everywhere, there does not seem to be
anything that will connect us to the people right outside our front door. That
is where Pados comes in. We believe we can bring back a sense of community to
the neighbourhood.

We believe we can take the best practices of social networking
and apply them to the real world community of the neighbourhood. It is an
obvious idea and there are tremendous benefits.

So why hasn’t anyone done
this before? Why has not anyone used technology to help us build stronger neighbourhoods?
I  I will write a bout in some later
post.

For now, it is just suffice
to know that Pados helps bring back a sense of community to the neighbourhood.
Go ahead; we have a free download for your Android -<Link>

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#BetterBhavishya – Delivering Social Impact

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At Futureshift, we believe that we will be able to contribute immensely to the social sector space by building on the capabilities, skill sets and the connections that we have built with our vast experience in transforming businesses around the world.

As a part of giving back, our consultants have pledged 20% of their time to work on social causes that will Maximize Social Impact. They will leverage their global expertise and use Futureshift tools and services towards those causes.

Some examples of the areas we are working on include

  • Solving the teaching problem in India by developing multi-media teaching aid with Pocket Power.
  • Solving India’s human rights problems by working together with Amnesty International. Projects like #bullynomore.in have gained traction to address the bullying in schools.
  • Solving literacy and numeracy problem by working with a leading NGO on how to expand footprints and volunteers.
  • Solving India’s vaccination problem with MyHealthshield that can help reduce tens of thousands of infant deaths due to missing the vaccination schedule.
  • Solving neighborhood safety problem with grouping, a solution for creating ‘instant ‘neighborhood watch’ without compromising on privacy of phone number.