Shakti Education Centre
The core of everything we give back — the Shakti Education Centre sits at the very centre of our giving. What began with a single donated laptop has grown into a complete classroom whose purpose is to bring children back into mainstream education.
It was started in 2019 by a former primary school teacher together with a colleague holding a master's degree in social work. We work hand in hand with the foundation: we helped build the school itself and we pay for a full-time teacher, stationery, uniforms and health camps.
The centre was never meant to take the place of school. It acts as a bridge for children who never had the chance to attend formal classes, bringing them up to speed so they can join the school system, and supporting them afterwards with homework help and after-school lessons.
For 2025 we are raising our funding to add a mental health counsellor, a life skills teacher, meals twice a week, a television for learning, and private schooling for five gifted children.
We are also investing in the 300 families living around the centre, through medical camps, water purifiers, deworming tablets and sanitary pads for girls.
Finally, we have opened a skills development centre that trains the children's mothers. By renting a space, buying sewing machines and employing a trainer, we can help them build steady careers and open up new opportunities for themselves and their children.
Santoshrani Shastripuram School
What we built with the Shakti Education Centre mattered so much to us that we went looking for something similar close to our other main production hub — Agra. We found exactly that in the Santosh Rani Shastripuram School.
Together with Kishor Exports we created the Kishor Shakti Foundation, funded by both of us, which lets us make a real difference in the community around us. The school is run by an NGO and offers high-quality education at a heavily subsidised price to children whose families could never afford private schooling. Land was donated to the school, which allowed good facilities to be built, and it is supported by several donors — now including us.
Safe Water Now
Millions of people still live without safe drinking water. That is why, across 2023 and 2024, we took a leap of faith and committed a substantial donation to Evidence Action, a young charity set up to make water in India safer.
By joining in, we became one of roughly ten donors backing a pilot study designed to prove how effective it is to add chlorine to drinking water sources across a number of rural Indian villages.
Since then the Indian Government has issued an advisory encouraging every state to adopt Evidence Action's recommendations from that pilot. For now the charity is in a "watch this space" moment as it installs another 400 systems to prove the case in a second study.
Our impact
Our most recent Impact Report takes a closer look at the people we work alongside, the materials we pick, the charities we back, and the progress we made over the course of 2024.