Over the past few months, conversations around India’s youth unemployment have found their way into everyday discourse .Beneath the memes, the moment pointed to something worth pausing on: a large section of India’s young population feels there isn’t a clear…
As evaluators, we come across and leverage many global frameworks, metrics, benchmarks, indices and more. While these are created in a way to have broad application potential, they don’t always translate 100%. When a global model is applied to a…
In 2022, working with the Piramal Foundation on the Khelo MP project alongside the Directorate of Public Instructions, Government of Madhya Pradesh, I went into the field assuming sport in a government school was mainly about producing athletes. Months on…
Safeguarding India’s Demographic Dividend from Problematic Digital Use What the emerging evidence, policy response, and programme landscape mean for CSR leaders investing in youth health and wellbeing. In early 2026, two developments signalled that India’s conversation on screen use had…
Women’s health is often discussed as a set of isolated biological events: puberty, pregnancy, delivery, menopause. While these investments towards these milestones have historically driven improvements in localized metrics, this approach fundamentally misunderstands how human health operates. Women’s health operates…
At a recent workshop hosted by NuSocia, a group of CSR funders discussed a shared challenge: how to verify the accuracy of the programme monitoring data they collect and report to their boards. With small teams, limited budgets, and often…
What India’s HPV Vaccine Rollout Invites Us to Ask On February 28, 2026, India launched free HPV vaccination for 14-year-old girls nationwide — a single dose aimed at preventing cervical cancer, a disease that kills tens of thousands of Indian…
During visits in various tribal regions, I assume we often notice an immediate focus on what “needs to be improved” in these communities. While there’s no doubt that support is essential in many areas to ensure equal opportunities, I sometimes…
Since the Companies Act, 2013 made CSR mandatory, it has channelled thousands of crores into education, healthcare, livelihoods, and rural development. For most nonprofits, it’s now the default source of institutional funding. For corporations, it’s evolved from a compliance line-item…
On why we’re so good at counting what we do, and so bad at counting what we prevent There is a report sitting on someone’s desk right now — meals served, vaccines administered, households reached. Every number in it points…
A working toolkit for CSR funders, philanthropists, NGOs, evaluators, and anyone else trying to figure out where they stand Four years after India launched its Social Stock Exchange (SSE), the honest answer to “how is it doing?” depends on who’s…
For a decade, June meant the same visual everywhere: rainbow logos, limited-edition merchandise, a flurry of sponsored floats. That visual seems to be increasingly fading in the last two years. Polling cited by Forbes puts the pullback at roughly 43%…
Welcome to this edition of The Social Audit. In the social development world, we talk a lot about “impact,” “sustainability,” and “systems change.” But we rarely talk about what happens when the workday ends and we have to walk back…
In India’s public health ecosystem, dozens of Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) worker applications are launched across states, yet few scale beyond a handful of districts. This raises a critical ecosystem question: When a CSR foundation, philanthropic funder, or state…
Adapting KAP methodology under evaluation constraints in a CSR education programme Sector Education / CSR Intervention type Science lab set-up for school-going children Evaluation type Retrospective impact assessment Methodology Adapted KAP (Knowledge, Attitude and Practice) Practice area Monitoring, Evaluation &…
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in India operates at the complex intersection of statutory mandates and historical inequities. As organizations strive for inclusive growth, Affirmative Action (AA) has become a critical barometer of social justice. Analyzing corporate AA reveals nuanced realities…
AB-PMJAY covers roughly 500 million people and is one of the largest public health insurance programmes in the world. A study published in BMJ Open this year is the first large-scale analysis of what it has actually delivered, four years…
India’s philanthropic sector is frequently described using numbers that sound authoritative. Figures in the trillions appear in conference decks and sector reports. Percentages circulate about how giving is distributed, which causes receive the most, and how many organisations are actually…
By the Public Health Center of Excellence and the Gender Center of Excellence India’s transgender population faces a healthcare crisis that long predates any legislation. Access to general medical care, HIV testing, mental health services, and gender-affirming procedures has remained…
By the Gender Center of Excellence There is a particular kind of institutional failure that is harder to correct than simple neglect. It is the failure that comes dressed as progress. It carries the right language, checks the right boxes,…
By Manju Menon, CEO NuSocia The social sector is obsessed with success and terrified of failure. In a space where the most important change is always slow, messy, and impossible to guarantee, that combination is quietly devastating. Let me start…
How M&E Became the Engine of Strategic Growth MEL has always been about learning. What’s changed is who’s doing it, how fast, and what technology now makes possible — especially in CSR, where real-time intelligence is replacing the annual field…
The ongoing conflict in the Middle East has triggered what the International Energy Agency describes as the largest oil supply disruption in history. Sustainability frameworks have generally operated on an implicit assumption that the global system, while imperfect, is broadly…
NuSocia AI & Data Center of Excellence | 2026 In September 2025, BCG published a report on what they called the widening AI value gap. The headline finding was stark: a small group of companies, roughly 5%, are pulling so…
In the development landscape, women-centered programmes are routinely framed as yielding benefits that extend far beyond the woman herself. Titles like “Empower Women; Empower the Next Generation” or “Investing in Women Uplifts Communities” are common. Important strategies and initiatives, packed…