Jeevitam’s latest initiative, called the Audacious initiative will be launched on Sunday 2 October. This is a partnership with employed women with the aim to help at least a million women and girls find work opportunities.
Livelihoods for women is cliché. Munish Chawla would rather flip it. How about Women for Livelihood, he poses.
There is a calculated, even cold, logic at work here. Cannot women work for creating livelihoods for more women? Can this not be at scale? Do women have to wait for a system run mostly by men to yield space for women? Can a woman not take the responsibility of mentoring another woman? Is it enough to watch how government livelihood projects work for women? The questions can go on. How about an answer? How about hitting ground?
Munish Chawla is the chief happiness officer of Jeevitam, a start-up out to help the unorganized sector comprising blue, white and grey collar workers from over a 1,000 cities across sectors and industries find livelihood opportunities.
Jeevitam is a thought-out-of-the-box platform. For a start, it began with registering workers for roles with the now-growing private sector and also bring them in as players in the gig economy. In the brief two years since it has been around, it has become a gateway to everyone seeking work and opportunities from any location, irrespective of the skills they bring.
Jeevitam’s latest initiative, called the Audacious initiative, is a partnership with employed women with the aim to help at least a million women and girls find work opportunities. Audacious initiative will be launched on Sunday 2 October.
It seeks to work alongside the common services centres (CSCs), access points for the delivery of various digital services in rural India to reach essential government and public utility services, welfare schemes, financial services, education, and skill development courses. Presently, there are more than 300 government and other private sector services being delivered through the CSCs. To add to the leverage, partnering corporates are expected to rope in their CSR arms as well.
Tech for livelihood
Recognising that access to the internet can be a roadblock for a job seeker to figure on a database, Jeevatam began with a voice-enabled database that did not depend on a smartphone.
The tech platform brings candidates to employers without much of an effort. From setting up a helpline to sourcing and managing part-time or full-time workers, gig workers and freelancers, prospects are briefed by audio available in over 25 Indian languages right down to the verification of profiles.
This technology solution addresses the digital divide by enabling the work seeker to interact with the digital ecosystem in the individual’s chosen language. At the same time, cutting edge technology like artificial intelligence and voice based digital profile at the backend serves to bring better, faster, cheaper hiring solutions to our corporate clients. Jeevitam has collaborated with NCS, NSDC, CBSE, RASCI, various corporates and startups to impact women with livelihood opportunities.
It begins with the realisation that recruitment is expensive and staffing agencies are challenged with sourcing the right candidates for the right work profile, at speed, scale and accuracy. Jeevitam, on the other hand, has a database of over 15 million potential employees for specific work requirement, in turn reducing hiring costs by up to 80 per cent.
The candidates are filtered in minutes as prospective employers browse its rich and deep database of work profiles to shortlist the right profile.
The start-up partners with the private sector, the government and CSR to facilitate access to sectors for creating livelihood opportunities.
“Jeevitam was designed to handle a complex challenge such as livelihood,” Munish says. “An easy-to-understand, easy-to-deploy, and easy-to-operate solution, Jeevitam has provided sustenance to thousands and helped businesses across the country to leverage Jeevitam as their hiring platform of choice.”
The technology is a first step in graduating the proletariat into the flexetariat as, today, while Jeevitam has broadened its approach to include workers looking for flexible working arrangements, especially as participants in the upcoming gig economy, it has an interesting tagline: ‘Work – When I Want, Where I Want’.
