Nudge Institute

The/Nudge Centre for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (CSDE) helps underprivileged youth, by teaching skills and assisting with employment. In five years and 10 states across India, CSDE has served over 20,000 youth.

Under CSDE, "Gurukul” residential training program was started in 2015, as a 90-day rigorous Program for Life Management (PLM) to deliver a transformative impetus to disadvantaged youth. Later “Future Perfect” began its activities in 2020, which is an online version of Gurukul, developed as a COVID-19 response, but growing to CSDE's most promising and ambitious initiative yet. It includes selection filters, training, employment, and post-employment support. Future Perfect is currently witnessing ~3,500 enrolments monthly, with 300+ online parallel classrooms running every day. Future Perfect focuses on the employability of youth through English and 21st-century skills such as problem-solving, interpersonal skills, and career planning, in addition to vocational skills. Placement assistance (100%) and job retention are provided as well.

CSI’s mission is to ‘nudge and nurture top talent to solve for India’s biggest challenges, at scale’. This is being achieved through a plethora of powerful initiatives like

• Incubator for non-profit startups (up to 15L + funding and ecosystem support)
• Accelerator for non-profit startups (up to 2 crores + capacity building and ecosystem support)
• Project Pioneer: research innovation grant (land and property rights for inclusivity)
• Samika Shakti (waste pickers project)
• Prize challenges like Cisco Agri Challenge (a 2cr prize contest for farmer-centric innovation)
• Indian Administrative Fellowship (Public-Private Partnerships for nation building)

In 3.5 years, 81+ non-profit startups have been incubated through CSI, with 15x fund multiplier effect and over 9 million lives reach.

The/Nudge Centre for Social Innovation has infused entrepreneurial energy into the development sector’s ecosystem and has built huge momentum in creating impactful solutions for empowering the disadvantaged. Every industry has been disrupted by startups, game-changing models of strategic collaboration and innovation for scale- except the social sector which still largely follows tired old narratives. However, this is changing. Disruption - which is the DNA of entrepreneurship, ambitious thought-partnerships and collective action - is now infusing India’s public and development sectors to reshape the future. CSI works in this space.

After two years of work in 80 villages (predominantly Jharkhand), CRD has transformed 5000+ ‘ultra-poor’ lives, 1200+ households through livelihood generation and access to social welfare nets, using the ‘Graduation approach’ to poverty alleviation. This successful model will be scaled nationally over the next few years.

Globally, 650 million people are estimated to be living in extreme poverty. In India, approximately 10% of the population lives in ‘extreme poverty’ (70 million). They are variously referred to as ‘extreme poor’, ‘ultra-poor’, ‘poorest of the poor’. ‘Ultra-poor’ are globally understood to be the 1.2 billion people living on less than $1.9 per day. They face the largest obstacles to climb out of poverty. Most of them live in South Asia (close to 507 million living on $1.9 or less a day), followed by sub-Saharan Africa (close to 414 million living on $1.9 or less  a day) and East Asia and the Pacific (close to 251 million living on $1.9 or less a day).  The ultra-poor are a separate segment, with many significant differences, from the “poor.” The households at this level of poverty are tied to availability of wage labour. They tend to be food insecure, living on less than 2 meals a day. Malnutrition exacerbates illnesses that further drain resources, leading to borrowings from exploitative moneylenders. They own few or no assets of even a non-durable nature (such as livestock), have limited livelihood prospects and are geographically and socially isolated.

For graduation out of ‘ultra-poverty’, first there is an identification of districts, blocks, villages for mobilization of households for the program, and then selection and validation of extreme poor households. The second part of the strategy includes consumption support for food security and initial grant for livelihood creation. Further, there is an inclusion of participants into SHGs, Social inclusion by registering participants into government registers, Financial inclusion by starting savings activities and linking to government funds. Other vital steps are local market analysis and livelihood planning, market linkage, technical skills training and life skills training. Last part of the strategy comprises linkage to microfinance and government schemes.

The 5-year goal of CRD (by 2025) is to enable 50,000+ poor families to graduate out of poverty through direct implementation, and rebuild the lives of 2.5 million people through the Hope Fund, a likely $30 mn fund.