Kherwadi Social Welfare Association (KSWA) (www.yuvaparivartan.org), through its flagship initiative, Yuva Parivartan (YP), offers a second chance to underprivileged youth and empowers women by offering skills training programs, ultimately leading to income generation. Over the past 25 years, KSWA has made a significant impact, enhancing the employability of more than one million individuals through concise and intensive courses.
KSWA collaborates closely with semi-urban communities, offering adaptable training and a robust support system, facilitated by an extensive network of counselors, leaders, trainers, and local partners. Addressing persistent challenges in rural areas, Yuva Parivartan's rural livelihood program imparts skills related to both agriculture and other life skills, creating new livelihood opportunities. Their operations are primarily focused on villages and small towns across India, with a particular emphasis on Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, and Goa.
Highlights
- Over 1.25 million students certified to date.
- 91% of urban and 65% of rural beneficiaries now earn a living.
- 52% of beneficiaries are primary family wage earners.
- 80% of efforts directed at small towns and villages.
- 70% of beneficiaries are women, promoting women's empowerment.
Increasing beneficiary reach through digitizing the mobilization process
KSWA shifted 80% of its operations to rural-focused CAMPs. These CAMPs provide skills training for rural youth in farm-based and allied livelihoods. They offer over 70 courses aligned with industry standards. KSWA planned to scale from 50,000 youths to 2 lakhs youths and scaling with current processes presented challenges in tracking beneficiaries, livelihood opportunities, village assignments, and field coordinator performance.
To address these challenges, Koita Foundation introduced the Journey to Livelihood app, automating data collection and analysis. This increased efficiency, reduced paperwork, and streamlined program monitoring. It will also support KSWA's expansion to more states.
Key Business Problem:
Field coordinators are responsible for village visits, engaging with key officials, obtaining necessary permissions and village assessment and mobilizing students through various activities such as door-to-door visits, pamphlet distribution and meetings with self-help groups etc.
Until now, this entire process has been manual, with field coordinators maintaining records using pen and paper. They would provide updates to area managers as required. Typically, each area manager oversees 5-6 field coordinators, making it challenging to track the work of field coordinators in each village. Additionally, field coordinators are assigned villages and mobilization targets through phone calls, contributing to information loss.
The reliance on pen-and-paper records and phone calls leads to significant data and information loss. Field coordinators struggle to monitor their own performance, track their targets, and plan their schedules effectively. High attrition rates among field coordinators further complicates the issue, resulting in information gaps and disruptions in program continuity.
Our Solution - Journey to Livelihood app
Koita Foundation worked with Kherwadi Social Welfare Association to build the Journey to Livelihood (J2L) app for area managers and field coordinators. J2L involves the a web application for area managers to plan tours and allocate targets to field coordinators (FCs). Additionally, a mobile app was created for FCs, enabling them to access their tour plans, record essential village details, such as key officials and needs assessments and view their assigned targets. The mobile app also allows FCs to monitor the status of villages (in progress, pending, completed), while area managers can track the daily progress made by FCs. The app functions offline, facilitating real-time data capture in the field.
The app brings several benefits, including improved tour planning and target allocation, resulting in better adherence to targets, enhanced outreach and optimization of mobilization methods. The availability of real-time data enables quicker identification and resolution of issues, streamlining operations for increased efficiency.
Working with the Koita Foundation has been a very rewarding journey. Their involvement throughout the inception and development of the project, brainstorming discussions, handholding and supporting our organisation to participate in this digital journey is deeply appreciated
We have gained valuable insights during phase 1 of the project. We are thankful for their personal visit to our centres and camp to understand the challenges ground staff are facing and their aspirations to have a simple and user-friendly system that will make the field staff's job simple and have more confidence in the technology. And yes we got the best of the app with simple data entry forms created, automated reports and weekly review meetings with field staff to attend to their issues, clarify doubts, and motivate them. Thank you Rekha, Rizwan and Drishti for their precious time and efforts to make this journey a success.
CEO of Kherwadi Social Welfare Association