$60,000 cash award for three NGOs

An organisation training girls from the Delhi slums to be professional taxi drivers, another working on the mental health issues of mothers and young girls from Kolkata, and an NGO responsible for introducing innovative research and education programmes for tribal girls in Andhra Pradesh have won the first Kubera-Edelweiss Social Innovation Honours (KESIH).

The award will give seed funding of $60,000 to three NGOs working to improve the status of the girl child in the areas of health, education and employability. Each NGO gets $20,000.

Anjali, a Kolkata-based NGO, has won the award in the Health category, while Azad Foundation from Delhi and Samata from Andhra Pradesh won in the Employability and Education categories respectively.

The winners have been selected from a pool of 118 participants across India, vetted by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) and EdelGive Foundation. The selection involved a four-stage evaluation process, supported by Ernst and Young as process advisors and official tabulators, and field visits by TISS.

Jury members included Farida Lambay, vice principal, Nirmala Niketan College of Social Work, Zia Mody, lawyer, Devaki Jain, development economist and activist, Ramanan Raghavendran, managing partner, Kubera Partners, Harsh Mander, human rights activist, Shekhar Gupta, editor-in-chief, The Indian Express, Shivnath Thukral, managing editor, NDTV Profit and Indu Shahani, sheriff of Mumbai.