Tag: USAID

  • Facebook-FICCI to promote social sector innovations

    Facebook-FICCI to promote social sector innovations

    NEW DELHI: The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and Facebook have joined to augment the Millennium Alliance (MA) initiative.

    Facebook has joined hands with FICCI as an Outreach and Knowledge partner to support and expand the development of the social enterprise sector in India. Both share the commitment to promote replication and scale of the selected social enterprise innovations across the South Asia and Africa regions in the identified priority areas of sanitation, education, health care, clean energy and agriculture.

    Facebook and FICCI together will also engage in organizing regular workshops & webinars for shortlisted applicants to promote the effectiveness of Facebook as a tool for promoting business and social innovations apart from helping them reach out and connect to relevant resources globally.

    The Millennium Alliance is an inclusive platform to leverage Indian creativity, expertise, and resources to identify, scale and expand the outreach of innovative solutions being developed and tested in India to address development challenges that will benefit ‘base of the pyramid’ populations across India and the world.

    The Millennium Alliance (MA) was launched in July 2012 jointly by the Technology Development Board of the Department of Science and Technology; USAID and FICCI to recognize India’s role as a global innovation laboratory, by identifying, testing and scaling solutions that leverage private and public sector resources and expertise to reduce the cost and increase the reach of development improvements in India and around the world. ICICI Foundation for Inclusive Growth, ICCo Cooperation, UKAID, WISH Foundation & World Bank subsequently came on board as Program Partners. The MA aims to create significant developmental impact at the base of the pyramid population. So far, MA has funded 62 projects, dispersing close to Rs. 55,00,00,000 in its key focus sectors.

  • Facebook-FICCI to promote social sector innovations

    Facebook-FICCI to promote social sector innovations

    NEW DELHI: The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and Facebook have joined to augment the Millennium Alliance (MA) initiative.

    Facebook has joined hands with FICCI as an Outreach and Knowledge partner to support and expand the development of the social enterprise sector in India. Both share the commitment to promote replication and scale of the selected social enterprise innovations across the South Asia and Africa regions in the identified priority areas of sanitation, education, health care, clean energy and agriculture.

    Facebook and FICCI together will also engage in organizing regular workshops & webinars for shortlisted applicants to promote the effectiveness of Facebook as a tool for promoting business and social innovations apart from helping them reach out and connect to relevant resources globally.

    The Millennium Alliance is an inclusive platform to leverage Indian creativity, expertise, and resources to identify, scale and expand the outreach of innovative solutions being developed and tested in India to address development challenges that will benefit ‘base of the pyramid’ populations across India and the world.

    The Millennium Alliance (MA) was launched in July 2012 jointly by the Technology Development Board of the Department of Science and Technology; USAID and FICCI to recognize India’s role as a global innovation laboratory, by identifying, testing and scaling solutions that leverage private and public sector resources and expertise to reduce the cost and increase the reach of development improvements in India and around the world. ICICI Foundation for Inclusive Growth, ICCo Cooperation, UKAID, WISH Foundation & World Bank subsequently came on board as Program Partners. The MA aims to create significant developmental impact at the base of the pyramid population. So far, MA has funded 62 projects, dispersing close to Rs. 55,00,00,000 in its key focus sectors.

  • Zee to extend language subtitles on channels to support educational initiative

    Zee to extend language subtitles on channels to support educational initiative

    MUMBAI: Quality education is the right of every child. Keeping this in mind, Zee Entertainment, in association with USAID, PlanetRead and the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) is planning to extend its Same Language Subtitling (SLS) initiative across more of its regional channels. Two years back, the SLS initiative was launched on Zee Talkies and Zee Marathi with the aim to improve the basic functional reading competency of children in Maharashtra. 

     

    The initiative is in line with the Ministry of Human Resource Development’s (MHRD) Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) – ‘Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat’.

     

    Speaking on this initiative Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited (Zeel) MD & CEO Punit Goenka said, “Television, being an effective medium of mass communication, is an excellent platform for children to improve their reading skills. We, at Zee, had undertaken this pilot project of Same Language Subtitling on our regional channels, Zee Talkies and Zee Marathi with the objective of improving literacy in children in Maharashtra. Over the span of two years, SLS has been activated for songs in over 250 frequently aired movies in our library. Seeing the successful results of this study, we plan to extend this project to our other channels as well.”

     

    IIM Ahmedabad and co-author of the SLS report Brij Kothari stated, “In the pilot project, for nearly two years, from June 2013 to May 2015, Same Language Subtitling was added on all the songs of 10 weekly Marathi movies telecast in prime time on Zee Talkies. The song-subtitled movies were further repeat-telecast in other slots on Zee Talkies and Zee Marathi. Together, this resulted in an unprecedented scale up of SLS in Maharashtra, far more than the project had even planned for or anticipated. The study has shown tremendous impact on school children’s reading skills, especially in Classes 1-3, with the results showing 10 to 14 per cent more children becoming good readers in each grade.”

     

    Conceived in 1996, SLS is simply the idea of subtitling mainstream TV content in the “same” language as the audio. What you hear is what you read. Several research studies have found that SLS causes automatic and inescapable reading engagement among viewers. Especially on song-based content, regular SLS exposure is known to contribute to reading skill improvement.