At Cognizant, we are deeply committed to creating conditions for everyone to thrive in. The Foundation continues to support underserved individuals across the country in three key focus areas: Healthcare, Education and Livelihood.

Under Cognizant’s ‘Operation C3—Cognizant Combats COVID-19’ programme, the Foundation continued its efforts towards strengthening the country’s public healthcare infrastructure, which was under severe strain, working closely with our partners.

I would like to acknowledge the guidance and contribution of our board member and former union health secretary, Mr. Keshav Desiraju, who passed away last year. He was passionate about our healthcare projects and his insights guided us in our efforts to support women and child welfare and mental health programmes.

In 2021, the Foundation realigned its goals and launched initiatives focused on the welfare of children, women, and persons with disabilities. We are pleased that the Foundation’s ‘Preventing Childhood Blindness’ initiative was selected as the winner in the ‘Healthcare (Large)’ category at the 7th CSR Impact Awards.

As the uptake of digital tools and solutions accelerate globally, it is important that persons with disabilities and women from underserved communities are not excluded from the workforce of the future. In 2021, the Foundation also launched its flagship programme – Tech4All, which empowers these groups to build careers in technology and technology-enabled services.

While we continue to champion initiatives on promoting digital inclusion and equity in India, we are focused on supporting programmes that harness the power of technology to improve lives and drive social impact. We deeply thank our partners for helping us in our journey towards leveraging technology for social good.

With seventeen years of experience, Cognizant Foundation has come of age and this graduation has been marked by an encouraging recognition of its work by industry peers and social media. These eventful years have taught us that things which everyone does could be done differently and to better effect. The shift from mundane philanthropy to focussed intervention has proved effective in sectors like Healthcare and Education. Pan India projects with substantial financial commitments from Cognizant Foundation have recorded notable success not only in urban areas but in rural locations as well. Credit for this achievement goes largely to the institutions that the Foundation is associated with. 

COVID-19 gave us yet another opportunity to demonstrate what timely and adequate intervention can do and how government and industry can hit-off together to serve a common cause.   

With more innovations like deploying the special skills of Cognizant in digital tech applications to assisted projects and partnering with leading research institutions in technology incubation, the coming years may have many interesting stories to report.

The year under review saw Cognizant Foundation firmly pivot its operations towards fulfilling the goal of “Empowering Communities through Inclusive Development.” Evidence of this focus was to be found even in its COVID-19 relief work. The Foundation supported vaccination for persons with disabilities in partnership with NGOs and in collaboration with Government Primary Health Centres (PHCs): over 4000 people with disabilities and over 4000 of their caretakers in Bangalore Rural District, Karnataka, and over 5000 people with disabilities and over 5000 of their caretakers in the slums of Kolkata, West Bengal benefitted. Support for COVID-related work continued to figure prominently, and at times – especially during the “oxygen crisis” – with the same frantic urgency of the previous year.

Two other initiatives to further inclusion and diversity we would like to mention here are Tech4All – a skilling programme for empowering women in underserved communities and persons with disabilities to build careers in technology and technology-enabled services, and ‘Blimey’ – a cloud-based learning platform developed in partnership with EnAble India to make digital learning accessible in multiple local languages for the visually impaired. In the area of healthcare Cognizant Foundation’s “Preventing Childhood Blindness” initiative came in for top recognition (in the ‘Large’ category) at the 7th CSR Impact Awards. Since 2019, over 123,800 infants and children have been screened across six states in partnership with five premier eye health institutions of which over 1,300 infants and children have received sight-saving treatments, and 2,700 children now have prescription eyewear.

Cognizant Foundation’s robust partner ecosystem continues to grow from strength to strength. One is also very happy to see the Foundation’s own staff resources being enhanced to meet the demands of the sharper strategic focus as well as the increased scrutiny and accountability requirements of CSR activities.

I am glad that Cognizant Foundation has continued its commendable work during the current year, despite the impact of the pandemic. All of us realise how difficult recent months have been and, on behalf of the Board, I want to commend and appreciate the work carried out by the team.

The three focus areas of the Foundation – Healthcare, Education, and Livelihood – have experienced tectonic changes due to the advancement of technology. All these three areas have been impacted significantly and forced organisations to rethink their strategies. In some cases, even the very purpose of their existence. Employees have once again emerged as the centre of an enterprise. In this context, the Cognizant Outreach programme is aptly placed to augment its reach to a larger community and society. I pray that humanity gains compassion, service, and love for fellow humans from this unexpected and unprecedented calamity. Cognizant Foundation can and should play a significant role and we will continue to encourage and support its initiatives.