Prior to Sattva, Lakshmi has worked with the Manipal Group, Jubilant Retail and ITC Hotels across sales, business development and strategy functions. She holds a PGDM from T.A.Pai Management Institute.

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Prior to Sattva, Sumit traversed various roles in his career from consulting for the United Nations and working for multinationals to running his own social enterprise. His company APART Education trained thousands of young graduates and improved the employability skills and quality of Indian workforce.

Sumit is an alumnus of the University of Oxford where he studied MBA as a Skoll Scholar.

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Sattva’s approach for the micro-apparel manufacturing centre is designed in such a way that it addresses the key problems of the rural communities of Uttar Pradesh highlighted above and tries to solve a small part of the larger unemployment and migration problems. The intention of the above micro enterprise development projects is to scale this business model to more and more villages and create a cluster of these micro apparel centres into a small-scale industries which provides employment to local communities and empowers women in the region.

Salient features of the apparel manufacturing centre:

1. The workforce to get at least 40% of the selling price on a per piece basis, which is much more than the current percentage of 10-20% of the selling price.
2. Women to form major percentage of the workforce in our centre
3. Entrepreneur driven centre in which the selected entrepreneur is from the community
4. The centre would be handed over to the community to be run by them in course of 2-3 years.

In other words, we are looking at this as a solution, i.e. more than just a “unit cost”, and enabling impact that has to go beyond measurement, to also look at scale + sustainability.

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SATTVA’S APPROACH
We designed and executed a programme based on an entrepreneur-led model here. The first step was developing a site selection framework using certain basic criteria:
– choosing a location for the manufacturing centre close to a solar plant to ensure a steady supply of electricity, – within a radius of 200 kilometres from the market,

The focus was on selecting married women to train since the study suggested that such selection would help maintain high retention rates. We covered 8-10 villages under outreach to encourage women to visit the centre and gauge their interest in joining the programme. Selected candidates were charged a monthly sum of Rs 100 to ensure accountability and retention. This 20-seater centre, in Kamalapur near Lucknow, trained women in apparel making over six months. Our on-ground training partner trained women to use automatic machines. Post this we worked on a job-order model securing bulk orders from vendors (wholesalers or retailers) in Lucknow which in turn were executed by these women over the next few months as part of on-the job training.

KEY LEARNINGS
The program had far reaching socio-economic impact as it saw women from orthodox families venture out of home into mainstream employment. As a result they were now empowered to improve personal livelihood and educational aspirations. In parallel, it highlighted the importance of creating market linkages for rural entrepreneurs as a crucial component for any skilling program. Our approach demonstrated that a well-designed model is imperative, but motivating and building trust with women is as important to mobilise them. During the course of the programme we saw women build personal relationships with each other and work together with complete solidarity. The company was able to make the first crucial step in solving problems of migration, gender gap in mainstream livelihood opportunities and unemployment in Uttar Pradesh. The Kamlapur centre served as the anchor in that area, enabling the energy service company to be sustainable enough to provide energy at community level covering more beneficiaries. Also, the client is now confident of replicating the model for similar projects in other locations.

OUTCOME
No. of women in program: 20 women
Centre location: Kamlapur, Uttar Pradesh
Increase average income: Rs 2000-3000 per month from Rs 200 per month
Age bracket: 21+ years

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SATTVA’S VALUE ADD
In order to reach the desired outcome for the customer and other stakeholders, we needed to ensure that the programme developed was aligned to the market. So, we built a training curriculum based on feedback we got from two large market players who gave us an outside in perspective. The curriculum focused on English skills and conditioning women to nuances of the retail sector — customer service, understanding the segment, corporate brand sensitisation. This was co-developed by the on-ground training partner. Our role was focused on pre-screening and evaluating fitment to the programme based on select criteria – educational qualification, basic English proficiency, and alignment to retail sector. Alongside, we actively engaged with potential employers in the market who gave us feedback on gaps in training and other value-adds needed, if any.

KEY LEARNINGS
This two-month long programme clearly identified that training candidates on high quality customer service for premium and luxury brands, has a definite advantage over mere English proficiency even though the latter is a key requirement. Training women on softer aspects – confidence, communication, presentability – helps them engage with customers better and eventually find employment opportunities across sectors. As the next step in our endeavour, we are now looking to expand to other aspirational industries which value customer experience as a core skill.
It also gave us and other stakeholders useful insights about this segment of women. For instance, most women or their families don’t want to be associated with retail due to long shifts and physical labour involved. Many came in to learn English therefore mobilisation was a key challenge. These findings helped us relook at the programme to bring in more value-additions. The duration, for one, was not enough to build both English and soft skills. As added benefit, the company was able to assess the aspirant needs better from the programme. Overall, these insights helped develop skill sets for candidates to be more aligned with demands of this job.

OUTCOME
No. of women trained: 34
No. undergoing training: 37
Placement rate: 76%
Average salary: Rs 11,000 in Mumbai and Rs 10,500 in Bengaluru
Companies placed: Fossil, Madura Fashion, W, FabIndia, Reliance Trends, Tata Trent, Louis Philippe, Aurelia, Shoppers Stop.
Educational qualification: Std 12th and Graduates

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SATTVA’S METHODOLOGY
We designed a technology-enabled programme to help the foundation reach its goal of creating a low-cost scalable model to improve English proficiency among college students. We started with a detailed study of technology-based solutions for English in the form of mobile apps, and then looked at products specifically catering to the job market. We shortlisted five technology partners based on the following parameters: alignment with the job seeker segment, ability to cater to scale, management capabilities, cost, interface, and specific features like gamification, incentivisation etc. The programme required students to speak in English for 15 minutes a day for three months leading to a consumption of 40 hours of technology-based content.
We then worked with four training partners working present in this segment to add our programme into their training modules as a supplement. Our application partners sent us weekly dashboards with data on time spent by students per week, content consumed per week, how often they logged in. The training partners helped us monitor their attendance in class. Post this we collected and analysed end results to assess levels of improvement with students.

KEY LEARNINGS
This programme demonstrated that a technology-enabled training model can be used as a low-cost method to scale and be replicated by others in the ecosystem. Through our efforts at designing, implementing and managing it, we gained several insights into the segment which are useful points for anyone who wants to adopt this model. We observed that this population of college students was extremely conscious of data usage and therefore the apps we selected needed to have offline functionality. Also, most students preferred gamification as this motivated them to compete with classmates. The foundation had a two-pronged vision through this programme – one was to make students more employable and second to create a scalable model covering an entire state.

OUTCOME
States covered: Haryana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Rajasthan
Scale: 7,000 students
Technology Partners: 5
On-Ground Training Partners: 4

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SATTVA’S APPROACH
The programme has a two-pronged strategy to enable the company reach its goal of empowering women in their households and communities alike. The first track involves mobilising and training 100 Digital Sakhis – women from the rural areas – in personal finance, digital financial literacy, leadership development and communication skills. These women in turn go out to train the larger community on same skill sets. Each Digital Sakhi has individual targets of reaching 1,000 rural community members which culminates to a total outreach of 1,00,000 rural population. The second track is focused on building the capacity of women entrepreneurs to help further develop their business. The first step was finding an implementing NGO with a background in enterprise development, financial inclusion and women empowerment with the ability to implement in the mandated geographies. After a thorough due diligence and selection process, we conducted a two-day co-creation workshop involving the financial services CSR team, business team and implementing NGO. The first day was focused on aligning all stakeholders on the aspirations, values and indicators of success for the programme, while on the second day we dived deep into the operational planning. This included open and honest conversations with all relevant stakeholders regarding the process of community mobilisation, batch sizes for women entrepreneurs, timelines, risks and mitigation measures among various other granular details. Once implementation began, spearheaded by the implementing NGO on the ground, Sattva conducted the programme management and M&E for the project duration and subsequent proposal development for phase two of the programme.

KEY LEARNINGS
This project successfully demonstrated the impact financial services companies can make through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives to do good for business and in turn, benefit the entire community. Our efforts as knowledge partners with end-to-end implementation support were found immensely useful by all stakeholders in helping drive this programme and moulding it to what it is today. In the end, the company was able to spread awareness on digital financial literacy and promote women’s enterprise development, while increasing their brand visibility on the ground in strategic geographies and strengthening their customer base.

OUTCOME
Reach:
● 100 Digital Sakhis trained on Digital Financial Literacy, Leadership and Communications
● 1000 women entrepreneurs upskilled in their respective trades, trained in enterprise development and digital financial literacy
● 1,00,000 rural population trained on personal finance and digital financial literacy
● Increase in income, knowledge and adoption of formal financial services
● Maharashtra: Pune, Osmanabad and Solapur districts
● Madhya Pradesh: Dhar and Barwani

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SATTVA’S METHODOLOGY
We designed an integrated curriculum combining theoretical and practical aspects of roofing and entrepreneurship. This was initiated with a framework to mobilise and train youth to bring them into the programme that spanned four months. Our foremost step to achieving this was a selection form with ‘must-have’ and ‘may-have’ criteria. The former ensured all candidates wanting to join the programme should have at least completed primary education and aged between 18-38 years. The latter selected youth based on their interest in becoming entrepreneurs, willingness to take a loan, prior experience in the construction sector and overall motivation to join the programme in order for us to understand their future plans for livelihood generation. Technical training involved working on a 6×6 shed as a practical exercise while classroom sessions involved simulation exercises, group activities and case studies. On the last day of training we brought in the company’s dealers from its local ecosystem and sales team to give candidates a better understanding of business and dealership. We handheld them as they set up enterprises including helping with financial and market linkages. We diversified opportunities for candidates breaking them into the following buckets: dealer/sub-dealer, contractors, enterprises apart from roofing; self employment: home based sales agents; employment: skilled labourers/roofers.

Our on-ground partners played an important role in identifying the right candidate for the programme – those with a strong will to commit to investing time and energy to grow in life. All candidates were certified by NSDC and CIDC at the end of the programme declaring them as ‘Masters in Roofing and Fabrication’ to help them access jobs or business opportunities in the market. More importantly, we have piloted a collaboration with an FMCG company who is providing loans to our candidates in Nashik at subsidised rates and helping them scale their business.

KEY LEARNINGS
The multi-regional project, undertaken in collaboration with the company, successfully demonstrated that micro-entrepreneurship is a viable solution to creating future jobs in a country where we require to train 500 million people by 2022. It is also a must-have extension of any skilling programme to reduce placement attrition. We have experimented in the first year, replicated in the second year and will scale in the third year. The intervention thereby proved its potential as a fertile ground for social investments. The programme added to the company’s value-chain with an inflow of candidates who started enterprises or became dealers. This ultimately spurred the company’s sales. Therefore it successfully showed that a company’s CSR initiatives can positively impact rural entrepreneurship as well as contribute to business.

OUTCOME
Age Group: 18-38 years

Mobilised candidates
Jamshedpur: 36
Burdhman: 36
Kharagpur: 32
Nellore : 52
Tumkur : 38
Madurai : 46
Jaunpur : 51
Saharanpur : 35

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SATTVA’S METHODOLOGY
Our first step was to review NGOs in each location. A few selection parameters to select these CSR partners included financial data, due diligence based on a check list of documents, prior work experience, focus on emerging and underdeveloped areas in education (digital classroom/sports), ability to work in multi-stakeholder environments with agility, as well as provisions for infrastructure and events centred around schools. Partner NGOs were asked to propose a Programme Plan – which comprised of weekly activities, infrastructure support and final culmination event, a crucial aspect for selection. The Programme Plans of activities by 23 selected NGOs were shared with the company’s CSR team. We then designed and executed necessary internal communication campaigns to get employees to volunteer. As employee sensitisation tool, we were able to successfully use in-house workshops as well as region-wise WhatsApp groups for continued engagement and motivation. To ensure smooth functioning of on-ground activities and their monitoring, we set up a robust progress monitoring and communication system involving designated SPOCs (points of contact) within the company.

KEY LEARNINGS
This project clearly demonstrated that a company’s CSR initiatives can be a great way to make the future generation more socially conscious and aware. Also, as a result of this engagement many employees were encouraged to continue volunteering with these NGOs independently. Through our efforts we managed to mobilise 695 employees who put in 2000+ hours of volunteering time. This project reinforced a positive perception of the company with its workforce across the board.

OUTCOMES
23 partners onboarded across 17 locations
Total investment outlay: INR 55 Lakh+
695 volunteers engaged
2000+ volunteer hours contributed
7,234 beneficiaries reached
Focus Areas: Digital Literacy, Education, Sports & Life skills, Elder Care, Child Welfare, Health and Well-Being, STEM, WASH, PwD

BLURB
“This project clearly demonstrated that a company’s CSR initiatives can be a great way to make the future generation more socially conscious and aware.”

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