March 08, 2016

Accenture and CINI’s Digital Solution ‘GPower’ Receives Vodafone Foundation’s Mobile for Good 2015 Award for Women Empowerment and Inclusive Development


BANGALORE; Mar. 8, 2016 – GPower, an innovative digital solution jointly developed by Accenture (NYSE: ACN) with the Child in Need Institute (CINI), has received the Vodafone Foundation ‘Mobile for Good’ 2015 award in India for women empowerment and inclusive development. ‘Mobile for Good’ awards is a flagship initiative of the Vodafone Foundation in India and supports emerging mobile solutions that have a transformational impact on society.

GPower – short for girl power – focuses on enabling underprivileged girls make a healthy transition from childhood to a productive adulthood by addressing key issues such as school drop-out, early marriage and trafficking. The mobile-based GPower digital solution helps bridge some key problems of implementation faced by national development programs targeted at the girl child, such as lack of convergence of program implementation at the beneficiary level, inefficient use of funds and human resources, and absence of uniform strategy guiding the welfare programs.

“Mobile technology helps bridge the gap in gender equality and inclusion in society and mobilises social change. This was the guideline for the award category women empowerment and inclusive development under the Vodafone Foundation Mobile for Good awards, the GPower project is a worthy winner for its focus on addressing social welfare program implementation challenges concerning the girl child in India. I am sure CINI will continue to scale up their initiatives and inspire others to address similar social issues,” said P. Balaji, Director – Regulatory, External Affairs & CSR, Vodafone India Ltd. and spokesperson for the Vodafone Foundation in India.

“Governments have a challenge in optimizing social development programs, and there is a huge potential to harvest synergies among programs currently operating in isolation. GPower helps improve and potentially transform the lives of adolescent girls at risk as well as enable a comprehensive development and empowerment program. The Vodafone Foundation Mobile for Good 2015 award will further inspire us and our community facilitators to fully realize the potential of GPower,” said Dr. Samir Chaudhuri, Founder and Director, CINI.

“Accenture is committed to supporting women and communities where our people live and work, and believe that innovation and technology can play an important role. With GPower, we are demonstrating how innovative use of mobile, analytics and cloud technologies can make a significant difference to improve lives and create positive change. It is a strong testimonial on the power of using technology for good,” said Sanjay Podder, Managing Director, Accenture Labs, Bangalore.

GPower revamps the data collection process by empowering community facilitators to register a beneficiary on-the-go through a mobile device and electronically capture beneficiary data on key parameters such as education, protection, health and nutrition status. The solution then ensures quick transmission of data to centralized servers using cloud-based technology, and the analytics-based functions process the data to provide insights on potential vulnerabilities of adolescent girls in real-time. This enables CINI to proactively intervene immediately, facilitate access to the most relevant services from government flagship programs to mitigate the vulnerabilities and ensure a better future for the underprivileged children.

The solution’s assessment system hence pulls together the power of social, mobile, analytics and cloud technologies to identify and predict beneficiary vulnerability trends in a continuous manner. The solution empowers adolescent girls by helping them identify and cope with vulnerabilities, counselling as per need and linking vulnerable girls with the available social welfare services. At the society level, GPower sensitizes and builds awareness in the community about behaviors that could be harmful to the girl child.

GPower currently works with over 6000 families in 20 villages of Murshidabad and South 24 Parganas, two resource-poor districts of West Bengal, India and has succeeded in re-admitting school girls into formal education, addressing cases of missing children and preventing child marriages.

More information on the Vodafone Foundation Mobile for Good 2015 awards can be found here.

About CINI
Child In Need Institute [CINI], a national award-winning organisation, for over four decades now, is contributing to national development process by creating community owned sustainable and scalable model. CINI has received twice the National Award – 1985 and 2004 – for its contributions to child welfare. The organization has piloted successfully and developed a convergence model known as Child Friendly Community (CFC) to facilitate vulnerable children and women’s access to Nutrition, Health, Education and Protection services from govt. functionaries. CINI has a long experience on working with adolescents and young population. CINI established its specialized Technical division, ‘Adolescence Resource Centre’ in 2000, to address the adolescent development issues, with a focus on sexual reproductive health [SRH] and rights. Gradually CINI learned that to ensure SRH outcomes, it is necessary to integrate protection as well as education, protection and nutrition issues in the adolescent interventions on SRH, including life skills education. CINI is also piloting digital technology for tracking and preventing vulnerabilities of women and girls in India. One of those initiatives is GPower, the software developed by Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company and implemented by CINI.

About Accenture
Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries and all business functions—underpinned by the world’s largest delivery network—Accenture works at the intersection of business and technology to help clients improve their performance and create sustainable value for their stakeholders. With approximately 373,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture drives innovation to improve the way the world works and lives. Visit us at www.accenture.com.

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Contact:

Kiran Balasubramanian
Accenture
+ 91 80 41060207
kiran.bala@accenture.com