The ICICI Foundation for Inclusive Growth
The Foundation seek to catalyse and accelerate social and economic inclusion by bridging economic and human development gaps. The ICICI Group continue to leverage growth opportunities in India and overseas, seek to make a significant contribution to the integrated development of our country and build a platform for sustained growth that will create value for our stakeholders.
ICICI Bank’s ‘Read to Lead’ initiative aims to bridge gaps in the access to formal schooling for a large number of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. This initiative aims to reach out to 100,000 children through different voluntary organizations, facilitating formal schooling, bridge courses, and supplementary teaching-learning material. For children like Riya, formal education is now a reality.
The Foundation’s mission is to improve the incomes of the low-income households in India. It believes that improving market access for low income households is the only sustainable way to bring about increase in their incomes and therefore it principally focuses its attention on redressing market failures which constrain them.
However, low income households are often not able to access even well functioning markets because they lack the necessary physical capacity and education due to lack of access to healthcare and schooling. It is also possible that even well-developed markets may not provide a level playing field for low income households. Also in the long-run markets may pursue strategies that are not environmentally sustainable. Driven by these concerns, the Foundation’s is actively mentoring institutions that work on these defined focus areas:
Markets: The Foundation focuses on facilitating universal access to finance to make markets more responsive to the needs of the poor and to link with low-income households both as producers and consumers. This is done through developing appropriate channels, business models and back-ends for financial services access. It also supports research and model building for expanding financial services access. The Foundation works closely with and mentors the IFMR Foundation (www.ifmrfoundation.org.in) and its partners to fulfill its own mission of increasing the incomes of low income households in a sustainable manner. It is the Foundation’s belief that addressing financial market failures substantively will have an impact on the access of low income households to a variety of other markets including healthcare, schooling and drinking water.