Project name: Buddy4study
Organisation: Buddy4study
Project Location & Coverage Area: Pan India
Project URL: www.buddy4study.com
Area of intervention: Education
According to a 2009-10 report by the Ministry of Human Resources Development, total dropout rate was 28.86 per cent and 42.39 per cent for primary and elementary categories, respectively. Poverty, family, economic and financial circumstances are considered to be major determinants of school dropouts. StuddyforBuddy, conceptualized by Ashutosh comes from a lower middleclass family of six, with four brothers. In his house, only one of their education in a reputed private school could be afforded. So his elder brothers decided to give up their share of schooling from a private school for Ashutosh, who was considered the meritorious one. Ashutosh decided to do something for those talented kids who sit back due to financial crunches and started Buddy4study, a scholarship web portal to inform people about inexpensive or free educational opportunities.
Buddy4study is a portal working on making the students, young aspirants and their parents aware about thousands of scholarships opportunities created and promoted by government, foundations, trusts, NGOs, and philanthropic communities. It provides the authenticated information platform to explore at one place about all such opportunities. It also ensures that students and parents receive such information on right time through various channels throughout the year. The firm has launched a unique scholarship alert service over SMS to provide time critical, actionable information about the same. The alert service can be subscribed to by the students themselves, teachers and parents. Some of the tool used are as follows: scholarship SMS alert service, scholarship Guidebook for school students, and application support provided to school students through groups in school territories.
Subscribing SMS alert was not enough, therefore, Buddy4study provided information through offline means like a guide book—the Buddy4study scholarship and entrance exam guide book lists more than 150 scholarships, apart from details about entrance exams. The guidebook also provides information on how to fill in application forms, myths and confusions, major eligibility criteria, types of scholarships, special exams, entrance exams and an exhaustive list of school scholarships.
Reach & Road Ahead
More than one lakh SMS alerts are sent to more than 1,700 subscribers – include students, parents & teachers. The scholarship guidebook for school students is another attempt to sensitize and educate community about available scholarship opportunities at one place. More than 500 books have been sold. Buddy4study claims to have made more than 50, 00,000 students aware about the scholarship opportunities. The organization has also published a scholarship guidebook and have partnered with leading English language and vernacular media publications to extend its reach.