Our students, Shine Varghese of Jindal Global Law School & Abhishek Ganesh of Jindal Global Business School were invited by the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) to the University of Chicago this past week.
Shine and Abhishek were selected based on their social entrepreneurship proposal, Jagriti:Improvement of Menstrual Hygiene through Woman Empowerment, a social enterprise, founded by JGU students, Shine Varghese Saji, Abhishek Ganesh & Sagar Shresth.
Jagriti aims to enable rural-unemployed women to become social entrepreneurs who will engage in the production and sale of low-cost, high-quality sanitary pads. Scaling this enterprise can contribute to tackling the problem of accessibility of sanitary pads, the stigma attached to them and, ultimately, help alleviate poverty for many rural women.
While conceiving the idea for JAGRITI, the trio had observed that accessibility and usage of sanitary pads is a huge concern among India’s rural population as there is often a stigma attached to their use. They had found that majority of pads in the market were expensive, and those which are affordable are often of bad quality. As a result, many rural women often use infection-causing rag cloths.
The JAGRITI project is being incubated by our social impact centre – Jindal Centre for Social Innovation + Entrepreneurship (JSiE) at JGU and has already partnered with a scientist based out of Mathura to provide low-cost sanitary napkin manufacturing units. The pilot run will be in Sisana, a small village near the university campus.
Jagriti seeks to empower village women to manufacture sanitary napkins that are cheap, highly efficient, and primarily biodegradable.
The CGI University program, created in 2007 aims to develop and engage youth leaders on college campuses around the world. Annually, the initiative hosts an event where students, school leadership and others convene to develop solutions to global issues.
In the last decade, students have made more than 6,250 commitments and been awarded close to $3 million in funding through the CGI University initiative.
Congratulations guys you have made us and the country very proud
