To Create Data Hub For Adolescent Health And Nutrition, NASSCOM Foundation Supporting Nourishing Schools Foundation.

Nourishing Schools Foundation, an organization that focuses on helping children tackle malnutrition, has been selected to participate in this year's Social Innovation Catalyst program.

The program, which is a collaboration between the The National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) Foundation's corporate volunteer program, My Kartavya and Tietoevry is designed to strengthen the ecosystem of non-profits by assisting certain non-profits to tackle technical challenges and make an impact.

Adolescents in India are faced with a myriad of nutrition problems and, because of the absence of data their nutrition and health are often ignored. As part of the Social Innovation Catalyst program, the NASSCOM Foundation will aid Nourishing Schools Foundation in building an Data Hub for nutrition and health for adolescents. This will enhance all participants' knowledge of nutrition and health in adolescence It will allow them to analyze information across different themes and geographical regions and recommend priority areas for action.

Archana Sinha CEO and Co-founder of the Nourishing Schools Foundation said, "We have collected more than 13,000 responses from children between 9 and 16 years old during our work. These responses are related to a variety of parameters related to their nutrition and health. We anticipate that this number will be over 22,000 by the close in the current year. In the course of the catalyst we were paired up with an expert of Tietoevry. He was able to help us create the policy on data privacy and understood the processes to ensure privacy and security of data. This will enable us to build confidence and credibility with other the various stakeholders, including government departments, other non-profit organizations as well as academic institutions and the general public when we share our data-based insight with them. These insights could help inform their programs, policies and research. We appreciate the assistance we received by The Social Innovation Catalyst program."

The My Kartavya Volunteering Program, Nidhi Bhasin, the CEO of the NASSCOM Foundation declared, "India's social sector has always been vibrant with more than 3.17 million nonprofits registered operating across a range of sectors. However, capacity-building particularly with the help of  technology, has remained the biggest challenge for this field. The creation of an ecosystem that supports the Indian social sector is a crucial element which will determine how fast it is possible to scale social transformation efforts and is the primary goal of the Tech For Good programmes. Under this program, there is the Social Catalyst Innovation initiative in collaboration and Tietoevry has proven that mentoring and support can help in creating lasting change on a large scale."