Frend Foundation

Our Mission

We want to catalyse socio-economic growth in rural India through a reliable network of digitally empowered women. We aim to achieve this by empowering digitally-enabled women to learn and earn, by facilitating livelihoods and developing entrepreneurial models for them to provide digital services to the community. Our goal is to empower millions of women across rural India to be able to earn a livelihood and lead a life of financial independence and dignity.

Who We Are

FREND is a not-for-profit organisation that aims to enable progress in rural India through a network of digitally-empowered women changemakers. Launched in December 2017, FREND traces its roots to the Internet Saathi Program – a joint initiative by Tata Trusts and Google – which extended internet access and digital literacy to women in rural India. FREND is now enabling income earning opportunities for this network of digitally-empowered women changemakers. We collaborate with not-for-profit organisations, the public sector and private sector companies to create a forward-looking ecosystem that helps budding women entrepreneurs in their journey to financial independence.

Milestones

2015

Google & TATA trusts launched Internet Saathi to impart digital literacy amongst women in 300k villagers in rural India

2017

FREND was formalized to further implementation of digital literacy and other livelihoods for Internet Saathis

2018

6k women have received livelihood opportunities

0.3Million USD income generated for women across rural India

2018 milestone

2019 (projected)

30M+ women trained
300K villages covered

2022 (projected)

Livelihood opportunities for millions of women across rural India will be created

2022 milstone

Impact

9/10 EXPERIENCED AN UPLIFT IN SOCIAL NORMS

9 in 10 Saathis agree that they have experienced a social uplift and directly attribute it to the program. They gained the right to express opinions in public settings and are considered a source of knowledge and information.

53% USE THE INTERNET TO LEARN NEW SKILLS

35% of the rural women want to use the internet to educate and inform themselves. 53% are using it to upskill, 41% to get better information about health and 32% are looking for governmental information.

8/10 GAINED ACCESS TO HEALTHCARE INFO

The majority (8 in 10) of beneficiaries attribute their access to healthcare information to the Saathi Program.

5/10 HAVE SEEN POSITIVE IMPACT ON EMPLOYABILITY

Saathi villages have seen numerous new businesses started which generate average monthly earnings of over INR 4,000. 2 in 10 beneficiaries claim to have set up a business in the last year and directly attribute it to the program.

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