PwC India Foundation celebrates its nine year anniversary
The PwC India foundation, a community outreach wing of the PwC India network, celebrated its nine-year anniversary late last month. The occasion was marked with a week-long digital literacy drive, involving training sessions in the various locations that the firm operates in across the country.
In the last week of September, Big Four consulting firm PwC celebrated 9 years of the PwC India Foundation. The foundation was established in 2008 as a community outreach program, including efforts in education, environmental sustainability, humanitarian response, water sanitation and hygiene, and social entrepreneurship. The foundation boasts the completion of 81 projects since its establishment in 2008, involving nearly 28,000 hours of volunteering, and affecting an estimated 87,000 lives in the country.
In keeping with the overall ethos of the foundation, the firm marked the anniversary with a one-week initiative to promote digital education in the country. Training sessions were held for women and children across the firm’s locations in the country, which involved an introduction to basic features such as web browsers, search engines, email and wiki blogs. In addition, the program sought to further bridge the gap by educating select trainers from NGOs across the country in computer basics, who would subsequently train underprivileged children with limited access to information technology.
The programme also focused on gender parity issues, training women in the use of technology to increase efficiency in daily activities, as well as engaging young girls with ideas of career orientation.
Commenting on the initiative, Jaivir Singh, the PwC India Foundation Vice-Chairman said, “In an increasingly digitised world, it is crucial that every citizen of the nation is equipped with the knowledge and skill to use information and communication technology. Education must be aggressively integrated with digital literacy skills if we want the workforce of the future to be digitally savvy and ready. In India, we need to urgently address the dire need of these skills.”
Literacy and humanitarianism
The digital literacy program represents one of the many inititatives undertaken by the foundation in the education sector. The firm helps students at each stage of their education, with informal educational programmes for the under-priveleged, scholarships for deserving candidates, and mentoring through secondary and higher education. The foundation also provides for differently abled children, executing rehabilitation and support programmes for children with hearing and visual impairments.
On the humanitarian assistance front, the foundation works in all three stages of a natural calamity, i.e. response/relief, recovery and rehabilitation. Extensive assistance has been provided on a number of occasions since 2013, including major incidents such as the Uttarakhand floods of 2013, the Nepal earthquake of 2015, and the 2016 cylcone in Chennai. Most recently, the foundation joined forces with a local NGO to restore ground water levels and improve access in the Shelgaon village of Aurangabad, a particularly drought-prone region in the country.
In other areas, the PwC India Foundation has engaged in tree planting drives and farmer assistance in their environmental sustainability practice, forged a development partnership with the School of Social Entrepreneurs for their social entrepreneurship drive, and conducted soft-skill training in hygiene in partnership with local NGOs. In all, the foundation now partners with 27 NGOs across India.
