IT industry body Nasscom’s CSR arm Nasscom Foundation aims to impact 100 million lives by 2026 through its digital learning, skilling and employability programs, said a senior executive.

With the top goal to enable women’s entrepreneurship, the foundation expects to impact over 25 lakh lives across 15 states by the end of this year itself, chief executive Nidhi Bhasin told. While the foundation is currently focused on urban areas it is rapidly expanding programs to rural India. These initiatives are part of Nasscom’s stated Tech For Good goals for the next decade.

“ We want to impact over 100 million lives by 2026. We are talking about tier two tier three cities and rural areas among others. So our whole agenda is that all our initiatives from Tech for Good for inclusion for all everything are targeted towards having the impact of touching 100 million lives,” said Bhasin.

Bhasin added that over 20 years of the foundation’s existence, it had largely focused on demographics across urban regions but is now increasing its focus across the rest of the country. Currently the Foundation has CSR initiatives across 15 states in the country. Out of its stated 100 million goal it expects to touch about 25 lakh within 2022 itself. Most of the programs under these initiatives are designed in-house through partnerships with educational institutions and tech companies.

“ We work within the NASSCOM ecosystem and we work with a lot of tech organizations,” said Bhasin.

She added that most of the foundation’s programs are focused on providing digital literacy across the country, in rural areas. One of its flagship women’s entrepreneurship programs was piloted last year in Madhya Pradesh with tribal artisans and now covers around 20,000 women across rural India.

“In the last one year, a major focus has been on women entrepreneurs- especially micro entrepreneurs, nano entrepreneurs, rural entrepreneurs, self help groups. We need to make them digitally literate for them to understand how to access the internet, ecommerce and social media, because that's become a very important part of how they can scale up their businesses.”

Bhasin added that the organisation designs the programs with the goal of having at least 50% female beneficiaries and is now expanding the skilling programs to include more people from the LGBTQ communities as well.