Education

Education is the key enabler of social change and a better society. We believe in a democratic social vision where each citizen is not only capable as an individual, but also sees the ethics of equity, the essentiality of diversity, the ethos of justice, and is driven by social sensitivity. We have been involved in various initiatives over the years in education which aim to address these across different groups in schools and colleges in the country. Over the years, these programs have evolved in scale, scope and maturity.

Systemic reforms in school education:

Since 2001, we have been working on issues of systemic reforms in school education in India on two fronts:

• To support the development and strengthening of organizations working in this space
• To support organizations that are working in other developmental areas including livelihood and  healthcare and encourage them to expand their work to school education.

Education for underprivileged children:

The program addresses a gamut of critical issues faced by disadvantaged communities – starting from enrolment in schools to nutrition for children, counselling services for parents and remedial education.

Education for Children with Disability: The program supports the educational and rehabilitative needs of children with disabilities from underprivileged backgrounds. Our approach tries to integrate enabling factors such as availability of nutrition, community support, specially trained teachers, assistive technology and access to healthcare.

Wipro Science Education Fellowship Program in USA: Started in 2012, the Wipro Science Education Fellowship (SEF) is a two-year program designed to improve individual teacher practice, foster teacher leadership opportunities and create a district corps of teacher leaders supporting sustainable positive changes in science education.

Wipro Science Education Fellowship Program in UK: Started in 2019, we work with King’s College London to offer UK’s first Master’s program in STEM education. We work with Sheffield Hallam University to provide rigorous continuous professional development to STEM teachers through Wipro Teacher Fellowship and Wipro Teacher Mentor programs.

Sustainability Education: Wipro earthian is our flagship program that brings together two of our key concerns, education and sustainability, into a nation-wide initiative for schools and colleges. Wipro earthian runs in two phases – the Wipro earthian outreach program and the Continuous Engagement Program (CEP).

Technology Education: Wipro Academy of Software Excellence (WASE) program runs in partnership with the Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS), Pilani, India, to help Science graduates study for a Master’s degree in Software Engineering. Wipro Infrastructure Management School (WIMS) is another program with BITS Pilani that helps develop and nurture exclusive talent in IT infrastructure business, especially Cloud Computing technology.

TalentNext: The program offers two weeks digital technology courses on industry-relevant skills to faculty members and offers a certification at the end of the course. They, in turn, leverage our course contents, platform, assignments, case studies and assessments to train their sixth semester students as part of the curriculum. The students trained by these faculty have to go through a 250-hour self-directed learning session and must qualify in the coding challenge to participate in Wipro’s campus selection process.

Community Care

At Wipro, we believe that it is crucial to engage with proximate communities wherever we have significant presence. We particularly try to work with underprivileged communities. This is a reaffirmation of our belief that social responsibility and sustainability must transcend boundaries whether organizational or national.

Our work is channelled through Wipro Cares in India, a unique trust that is based on the operating model of employee contributions matched by Wipro Limited. Nearly 32,000 Wipro employees are engaged with Wipro Cares, either through volunteering or by way of monetary contributions or both. Wipro Cares works in the areas of primary health-care, community ecology and disaster rehabilitation. Our employees across the world are keen and enthusiastic participants in local community initiatives. In 2019, through the Spirit of Wipro (SoW) Run, more than 13,000 Wipro employees from across the globe contributed to their local charities. In North America, through the First Book program, over 150 Wipro employees volunteered hundreds of hours and distributed more than 13,000 books impacting more than 1,000 at- risk and rural students. Our other initiatives include disaster rehabilitation in Australia, biodiversity conservation in Spain, healthcare in Europe & US, food drives in Brazil & US and education for disadvantaged children, particularly children with disabilities, in Philippines.

Urban Resilience

Wipro through its community programs is working closely with industry, government and communities to create platforms that enable working on some fundamental and challenging issues. These include:

Bengaluru Sustainability Forum(BSF): BSF was set up in early 2018 and convened by Wipro along with the National Center for Biological Sciences. Bengaluru Sustainability Forum brings together civil society, academia, research institutions and the government with the goal of fostering curated interactions between different stakeholders on issues of urban sustainability , water conservation, biodiversity, climate change, and health.

Small Grant Program: Through the ecology seeding and small grants program, we offer support to organizations working on the ground on urban ecology issues in the water and waste domain.

Urban Water: Our long term projects on Urban Water in cities provide key policy insights and levers for citizen engagement and advocacy on ground water management and its relationships to surface water flows and water bodies such as  lakes, tanks and wetlands. We bring together hydrogeologists, academia, government, citizen groups for a nuanced understanding of issues, catalyzing citizen action on the ground.  In Bengaluru, we have worked extensively over the last four years in two peri-urban geographies with different land use and demographic profiles. We have initiated a similar long term program in Pune – which includes citizen-led mapping of ground water data and creating institutional capacity with government and other players for revival and rejuvenation work.

Waste: We supported a study to understand the contribution of the informal economy to waste and material recycling in India and their perspectives. A book has been published based on this study.