BlueskyCSR

World Youth Skills Day was observed on 15 July, marking more than a decade since the UN General Assembly first designated the day in 2014 to spotlight the strategic value of equipping young people with skills for employment, decent work, and entrepreneurship. This year’s UNESCO theme, “Skills for a Shared…

India Ranks 105th on the Global Hunger Index. Here Is What Nutrition NGOs Need to Show CSR Funders. India’s rank on the 2024 Global Hunger Index is 105th out of 127 countries, with a score of 27.3 — placing it in the “serious” category alongside Pakistan and Afghanistan, and behind…

India Spends Rs 8,739 Crore on Healthcare and Sanitation CSR. Most of It Arrives Too Late. Healthcare and sanitation together form India’s second-largest Schedule VII CSR sector. MCA sector allocation data for FY 2022-23 put combined spend at Rs 8,739 crore, out of a total national CSR spend of Rs…

Ten crore rural women in India now belong to a Self Help Group. The Ministry of Rural Development told the Lok Sabha in October 2024 that DAY-NRLM has mobilised 10.05 crore women into roughly 90.87 lakh SHGs, a scale of community institution-building with no real parallel anywhere else in the…

Three years ago, an NPO leader said something during a strategy session that captures where the sector was: “We are a development organisation, not a stock market entity.” That same organisation recently reached out asking how to prepare for SSE listing. The accountability infrastructure of India’s social sector is changing.…

Consider this: a programme trains 300 tribal women in tailoring. The first two cohorts run well. Completion rates are strong, toolkits distributed, income projections modelled and presented to the board. On paper, the programme is working. By the third cohort, attendance has fallen sharply. A detailed assessment by BlueSkyCSR traced…

Seven years ago, a CSR manager said something to the BlueSkyCSR team that has stayed with every assessment since: “We just need to spend the 2%. The law requires it.” Last month, that same company’s community programme ran its annual harvest event. The corporate team was not present. The NPO…

In 2023, the Annual Status of Education Report found young men in rural India more than twice as likely as young women to own smartphones: 44% compared to 20%. Separate survey data placed women’s digital literacy nationally at 29%, against 59% for men. These figures describe a structural gap, not…

Across BlueSkyCSR’s portfolio – 70+ clients served, 200+ projects assessed, 40+ years of collective experience, ₹200+ crore worth of projects assessed – one pattern consistently separates high-impact programmes from those that plateau: the best performers are not running parallel to government schemes. They are plugged into them. This is a…

Across multiple CSR impact assessments conducted by BlueSkyCSR spanning rural India, one finding surfaces with enough consistency to warrant closer attention: programs that center women as primary stakeholders, and that invest in their agency rather than just their access, generate returns that extend well beyond the individual. This is not…