German tech giant SAP Labs, which recently won the Golden Peacock Award for its programme Code Unnati — a digital literacy and IT skills development initiative that aims at fostering digital inclusion — says its corporate social responsibility initiative in the remotest areas of North Karnataka will be empowering a lot of young women by providing them with employable skills.
The Girl Power Tech initiative, announced during the SAP Developer Kickoff Meet in Bengaluru, by Sindhu Gangadharan, MD, SAP Labs India, has an ambitious goal — not only to make women in remote parts of the state skill-ready to adjust in the IT space but also to close the loop between competency and employability.
“Girl power tech is going into some of the very remote areas within Karnataka,” Gangadharan says. “In some parts of northern Karnataka we’re trying to bring in women from underprivileged areas and not just give them the skills but also close the loop for them where they can come in (to the organisation) and experience for a period of eight weeks, what it means to work in a corporate environment like SAP,” she says. In some cases, this will be followed up by a role within the organization if there is a potential fit based on a particular skill set.
Code Unnati has given SAP the opportunity to leverage technology and talent and create sustainable ways in which it can give back and empower communities. To the company, these core programs also help in nation-building.
Code Unnati, she said, has touched more than one million adolescents and children. “More than 7000 youth have been trained in our industry skills, data science, machine learning, AI, and IoT,” she says.
Gangadharan says SAP Labs has picked the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs) around equal opportunity and gender equality. Many of those goals and how the company aligns with them are listed here.
With Mahindra & Mahindra, SAP is also supporting the ‘Nanhi Kali,’ an initiative focused on the girl child. Since Girl Power Tech is a Human Resources initiative, Gandhadharan says it’s the employees who take the initiative of driving it. And that, according to her is also one of the best things about working at SAP Labs — the use of technology for the larger benefit of humanity.
