In January 2018, OSA Impact gave its first Innovation Grant to Krushaco, an agricultural technology and services company based in Odisha, India. Along with the seed funding, OSA Impact agreed to provide advisory services to help Krushaco develop its strategy to serve the farmers of Odisha.Krushaco worked to develop relationships with farmers in rural areas […]

One of the core goals of OSA Impact from the beginning has been to support innovative social entrepreneurs in Odisha with seed capital and advisory services in effort to help them prove their business models and create a clear path towards achieving impact at scale. In February of this year, we announced our first grant: “So […]

On a relatively quiet street in Bhubaneswar’s Baramunda district, Biswajit Nayak is trying to revolutionize the way kids learn in Odisha. His startup, Shikhya, is in the field of education technology, a sector that has admittedly seen questionable educational impact over the past decade.Consider the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, an ambitious undertaking which […]

Odisha is ranked as one of the poorest performing education systems in all of India, while India itself has various issues in its education quality. On the larger scale we see that access is nearly universal, however, overall education quality suffers — the Brookings Institute reports that while enrollment in primary school is around 96%, […]

In our last Insights, we took a basic look at the Odisha healthcare system with context from the state of healthcare in India overall. We’ve observed that both the national government and state government are looking to improve the current system. However, there are also many founders that don’t want to wait. Here are some […]

Healthcare is a never ending concern for societies of all types, especially in the modern era where states are more and more held liable for the physical and mental welfare of their citizens. Most developing nations have systems with full sponsorship by their governments, whereas other nations, like the United States, still see heavy involvement […]

OSA Impact has officially awarded its first OSA Impact Innovation Grant to Krushaco, an early-stage social enterprise in Odisha.The founding of OSA Impact was catalyzed by our awareness of one particular issue. Specifically, we understood the power of social enterprises — companies with a core mission rooted in social impact combined with business models. These […]

Note: The views expressed below are the individual views of Abhishek Panigrahi, OSA Impact’s Executive Director, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Odia Society of America.By having various conversations with stakeholders in the Odisha ecosystem, including entrepreneurs, teachers, nonprofits, venture capitalists, major corporations, and more, I tried to build a framework or […]

After a comparatively slow start, Odisha is now taking giant leaps towards the development of a vibrant and dynamic startup ecosystem. Several proposed changes to the existing Odisha Startup Policy will make it extremely lucrative for young entrepreneurs to start up in the state. Recently, the state signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Invest […]

Introduction In just the past decade we’ve seen a paradigm shift as a new model of social impact has emerged: social enterprise. Social entrepreneurship has largely captured the attention of charities, philanthropists, and academics, yet it is largely absent from the dialogue of the general public. So what exactly is this mythical term, and why […]