News & Media
Seeing Impact: iMerit Goes to XLRI
January 25th -27th members of the iMerit leadership represented the company at the 5th National Conference on Social Entrepreneurship at the XLRI-Xavier School of Management in Jamshedpur, Jharkhand. The theme for this year’s conference was Innovations in Livelihood Promotion & Skill Development. Leaders in the social entrepreneurship community from around India and the world gathered to discuss the topics ranging from rural livelihood creation to the promotion of livelihoods for individuals with physical disabilities to scaling up livelihood promoting social businesses. iMerit was able to contribute substantial insight to these conversations as a forerunner in providing high quality web-enabled IT services to the international business community while employing individuals from rural youth and women. Our integrated model with our NGO partner is one that many social businesses have a keen interest in. Many of our conversations over the conference tea breaks, lunches and dinners centered around the strengths and weakness of such an approach.
All this talk about livelihood promotion allowed us at iMerit to reflect on the social good our company is able to do. Over 92% of the Indian workforce still works in the non-formal unorganized sector.[1] While many Indians are able to make good living through self-employment and, a large number of the Indians in the informal sector are susceptible to greatly variability in their incomes over their lifetime. That variability in income limits many from pulling themselves and their families out of poverty. By training individuals through our strategic partner Anudip Foundation and then employing them at one of our iMerit centers, we can transition individuals from the informal sector to a stable formal sector job. This transition results in sustainable employment and stable income for our employees and their families in East India.
Like many of the companies represented at this conference iMerit is playing our part in livelihood development in India. Overall, our trip to XLRI allowed our company to share our successes with those social enterprises just starting and learn a great amount from those that have been promoting livelihoods through social business for many years.
We will look forward to attending next year!
