Niladri Sahoo

Foundation for Rural Entrepreneurship Development (FREND), a organisation promoted by Tata Trusts and supported by Google, has been working as a vehicle for other like-minded organizations to leverage the power of the Internet Saathi network for socio-economic development of rural India. This would also enable sustainability for the Internet Saathi network, opening up avenues of economic opportunity for them.

In April 2019, CYSD entered into an agreement with FREND to implement an eight-month Internet Saathi programme with an objective to extend digital literacy knowledge to the rural women in 6 districts of the Odisha State, like Khurda, Puri, Cuttack, Jajpur, Keonjhar and Mayurbhanj.

The programme aims at imparting digital literacy training to more than 1.8 million rural women and helping them understand the benefits of internet. Also, this programme has an agenda to address the digital divide and technology discrimination, specifically, bridge the online gender divide in rural India” The programme would reach 8000 villages in 77 Blocks of these 6 districts through Internet Saathis. For the purpose, the Saathis are equipped with two android cell phones with internet connectivity and modules to learn the programme curriculum. The digital literacy programme will later-on followed with the livelihood enhancement interventions for the Internet Saathis. FREND is monitoring the project implementation with periodic visits to the project locations.

A group of personnel comprising of one State Coordinator, 6 district coordinators, 77 block coordinators and 2286 Internet Saathis are engaged for smooth implementation of the programme. By end of July, the Internet Saathis have trained around 1,43,128 women in six districts