The fellowship is developed as a pre-incubation model that would provide youth with an opportunity to establish their social enterprise focusing on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) based solutions for solving community issues, said a senior officer of the NITI Aayog, which has launched the Fellowship under Atal Innovation Mission.
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India, in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), has introduced a Community Innovator Fellowship to mark the ‘International Day of Women and Girls in Science’.
The fellowship is developed as a pre-incubation model that would provide youth with an opportunity to establish their social enterprise focusing on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) based solutions for solving community issues, said a senior officer of the NITI Aayog, which has launched the Fellowship under Atal Innovation Mission.
This is going to be a one-year-long intensive fellowship program which has been designed for an aspiring community innovator irrespective of their socio-economic background, the officer said.
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During the course of this fellowship, each fellow would be hosted at one of the AIM’s Atal Community Innovation Centres (ACICs) and acquire SDG awareness, entrepreneurial skills and life skills while they are working on their idea, the NITI Ayog said.
The ACICs would nurture youth-led innovations by providing suitable resources in terms of operating facilities, co-working space, maker labs and a dynamic business network to the innovator.
The CIF Program would mainly focus on facilitating knowledge and capacity building among aspiring community innovators essential to their entrepreneurship journey. This is one of the ways with which AIM would try and achieve participation of youth in mainstreaming social enterprise as a culture in the start-up ecosystem, the officer said.
Launching the CIF, NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant said, “Creating a pre-incubation space for young and energetic innovators is a very important step in building vibrant, inspiring solutions for community problems. This fellowship is an ingenious way to engage the young change makers as well as various other stakeholders in the community innovation ecosystem in building holistic and inclusive innovations.”
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