We have entered into a partnership with the Grameen Foundation for Social Impact (GFSI) as a part of our Paytm AshaKiran initiative to provide self-employment opportunities in banking and finance to rural women & youth. Under this partnership, we will provide job oriented training with the aim to increase financial literacy and inclusion among unbanked and underbanked segments of our society.
For the first phase, a pilot has been planned for the Nagpur district of Maharashtra that will potentially reach over 300,000 people and educate them about Financial Education and Digital Financial Literacy by the end of the current financial year. The project will continue to extend this opportunity to several smaller cities and towns across Maharashtra, Karnataka, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and other states across India.
Grameen Foundation will leverage G-LEAP (Grameen Learning Platform), an Android- based mobile learning platform and Grameen Guru, an Augmented Reality based Chatbot application, to help train and equip people, while we will render our holistic banking and entrepreneurship training to help these individuals and promote self-employment.
Renu Satti, MD & CEO – Paytm Payments Bank said,
“We are excited to partner with the Grameen Foundation in our endeavour to empower rural India. We are constantly striving towards making them understand the financial services sector and helping them to join the mainstream economy. Our aim is to bring uninterrupted banking and financial services access to the remotest villages in our country. We will continue to focus our efforts towards supporting and educating rural women and youth, helping them move towards financial inclusion.”
Speaking on the occasion, Prabhat Labh, CEO of GFSI, said,
“This partnership brings together Grameen Foundation’s unique strengths in technology- enabled learning, human-centred design and deep understanding of barriers and challenges faced by underserved communities and innovative digital finance and payment products of Paytm Payments Bank to offer an effective and scalable solution for livelihood development and financial inclusion of women and youth”.
This project will also build on the success of earlier Grameen Foundation projects to digitize operations of microfinance institutions through Aadhaar Enabled Payments (AEPS), deployment of Interactive Voice Response based learning, implementation of Business Correspondent model in MFIs and promoting goal-based savings amongst low-income women.