Sabre partners with The/Nudge Institute and TAP to develop social and emotional skills among underprivileged children
Bengaluru: Sabre Corporation, a leading travel technology provider, today announced a collaboration with The/Nudge Institute—formerly The/Nudge Foundation, an action institute that works with governments, markets, and civil society to build resilient livelihoods for all—and The Apprentice Project (TAP), a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering underprivileged children. This partnership aims to provide skill development programs among children of low-income daily wage earners, specifically in areas like social and emotional skills, 21st-century skills, and various other skill development areas.
Sabre, being a travel technology expert, is ensuring that TAP builds a technically scalable and performance system. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP), Sabre is helping train TAP WhatsApp bot ‘TAP Buddy’ which supports the response to millions of queries from children. Currently, the NLP feature acts as a help desk and is used by 7000+ children, and the bot has already answered 100’s of queries through its unique answering mechanism in the last two months. They are now ready to impact thousands of children at scale.
TAP Buddy, powered by NLP and AI, along with gamified behavioral nudges, makes the learning personalized, yet the model is highly scalable for 100 million children. Sabre mentors are additionally supporting the effort through direct interactions during planning and implementation. In 2021-22, TAP worked with 3500 children and the primary challenge was answering the queries posted by children on the WhatsApp bot. They also looked into the bot’s function and scalability, when the numbers of users would be in millions. TAP is currently working with around 10,000 children and intends to scale up to one lakh in the coming years.
Nearly 250 million kids from low-income communities in India lack the socio-emotional learning (SEL) skills, opportunities, and exposure to thrive in the 21st century. TAP is one such initiative whose vision is to empower all children to become leaders of today and tomorrow. TAP is working towards building SEL skills and knowledge among these children through self-learning videos delivered via WhatsApp chatbot, TAP BUDDY. The self-learning videos include Arts, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), Digital, and Financial Literacy, thereby inculcating essential skills such as creativity, problem-solving, communication, and financial literacy.
“We are deeply committed to building socio-emotional skills in kids of the age groups of 10 to 14 years daily wage earners who have a monthly income of about Rs.12,000. I am particularly heartened by the support we have received from Sabre for this program. Sabre Mentors provided feedback and suggestions during the regular and off-cycle, which helped build constant communication between Sabre and TAP teams at each step of the Sabre/Nudge program. Every empowered child is a step in the right direction for us,” said Anand Gopakumar, Co-founder and CEO, The Apprentice Project.
Speaking on the partnership, Sriram Gopalswamy, Vice President, Site Reliability Engineering, Sabre Global Capability Center, Bengaluru, said, “At Sabre, we always strive to improve how we interact with the community. We are dedicated to giving back to society as part of our Corporate Social Responsibility goals and focus on community initiatives that promote education and capacity building for future generations. We are privileged to be a part of this initiative by working towards building on one of the biggest problems faced by Indian students today, from low-income communities that lack opportunities to succeed in this fast-paced environment. The partnership with The/Nudge and TAP helped us to work on creating livelihood opportunities at scale.”
“Sabre is a strong partner for The/Nudge’s Incubator program, working closely to achieve our shared vision of supporting exceptional non-profit entrepreneurs with the potential to solve India’s critical developmental challenges at scale. The Sabre team’s deep involvement, including providing the entrepreneur with mentoring support and additional funding has helped the start-up achieve great momentum for their work,” said Subhashree Dutta, Managing Partner, Social Entrepreneurship, The/Nudge Institute.