T-Works, CARE India Design Center Join Hands to Leverage Innovation to Solve Social Problems

T-Works, India’s largest prototyping centre, and CARE India, a not-for-profit working towards the empowerment of marginalised women and girls, entered into an agreement to collaboratively build affordable and accessible innovations in health, education, economic empowerment and humanitarian assistance that can be scaled globally.

Working with impacted communities, the partnership is taking on the multi-pronged issues of household air pollution due to inefficient cooking practices such as the usage of traditional ‘chulha’ or cook stoves. According to WHO, every year almost 4 million people die prematurely from illnesses attributable to household air pollution from inefficient cooking practices. Challenges of access to resources, threat to fragile landscapes and potential enhanced female labour participation rates are other issues that get addressed as T-Works and CARE India work on this problem.

T-Works, CARE India partnership has also started efforts towards enhancing access to and outcome-based delivery of Foundational and STEAM learning for children in rural and remote settings. Access delivery mechanisms and pedagogies crucial for children to excel in an innovation-led world are key impact areas. T-Works and CARE India through its Design Center are creating mobile labs with scientific models and laboratory setups to facilitate learning.

Over the next three years, CARE India intends to deepen its programmatic impact by leveraging innovations developed together with T-Works. As part of this collaboration, T-Works with its designing, prototyping, and production capability will build impactful solutions and CARE with its deep understanding of social problems and implementation strengths will build and deliver high impact programmes in India and globally. 

“While T-Works facilitates startups, SMEs, and corporates to build the next generation of products and solutions, we also have a mandate to bring positive change in the lives of the underprivileged. We are already doing this through the Rural Innovation Development Program and Healthcare Innovation Development Program. This partnership with CARE India will give us a deeper and much wider perspective, enabling solutions that are co-developed by us both to reach end-users in India. There is also an immense opportunity to scale such solutions globally through the CARE confederation” said Sujai Karampuri, CEO T-Works.

“CARE is a humanitarian organisation in India for more than 70 years and part of CARE global confederation, which has impacted more than 400 Mn people in over 100 countries. Through this agreement, we are combining CARE India’s vast experience in problem identification through primary research and deployment with scientific impact assessment with T-Works’ design, engineering, and production expertise. It is an ideal partnership to deliver impactful solutions for the poor not only in India but across the world” said Manoj Gopalakrishna, CEO CARE India.

T-Works and CARE partnership have conducted immersion programs in Karnataka and Odisha. The teams studied CARE India’s programs on Improved Cook Stoves (ICS) and conducted ethnographic interviews to understand the problem from the users’ standpoint. This will lead to the conceptualisation, creation and execution of human-centric solutions, towards solving the household smoke-emission challenge.