Billimoria Jeroo
Organization: Aflatoun, Child Social and Financial Education
Year Founded: 2005
Country: Netherlands
Website: www.aflatoun.org
Geographic Area of Impact: .
Model: Leveraged Non-Profit
Focus: Children and Youth,Financial Inclusion,Human Rights.
Schwab Fellow of the World Economic Forum Audio Interview The Innovation Jeroo Billimoria is a “serial social entrepreneur” who has launched and scaled numerous transformational enterprises. One of her first major projects was Childline, a 24-hour toll-free telephone hotline for children in distress that today operates in 83 of India’s largest cities. Childline has responded to over 13 million calls in assisting vulnerable children with medical assistance, protection from abuse, education, repatriation, counseling, long-term shelter and other emergency services. Building on her success in India, Billimoria established a global network of children’s helplines called Child Helpline International (CHI in 2003). Their mission includes establishing new helplines and strengthening existing ones. Child Helpline International now supports helplines in 110 countries. In 2005, Billimoria founded Child Savings International (CSI) now known as Aflatoun. Te aim of Aflatoun, is to inspire children to socially and economically empower themselves and become agents of change in their own lives and for a more equitable world. By offering a unique blend of Child Social and Financial Education (CSFE), children learn about their rights and responsibilities as citizens of the world and about democratic principles. They also receive basic, but comprehensive, financial education on saving, spending, planning, budgeting and entrepreneurship. The CSFE concept is all about balance. These concepts are brought into practice through self-governing, student-run savings clubs and microenterprise activities as well as child-centered, hands-on exercises like games, puzzles and role-playing. Background India has millions of children who live on the streets and hundreds of thousands who are extremely vulnerable to illness and abuse. In 1993, Jeroo Billimoria, a professor at the Tata Institute of Social Science (TISS) in Mumbai, began lobbying India's Department of Telecommunications to establish a toll-free emergency hotline for lost, endangered or injured children. Billimoria had seen the need for effective crisis intervention while working with street children in Mumbai's night shelters. She mobilized support from TISS, government agencies, local child service agencies, foundations and businesses to build the Childline network, which was officially initiated in June 1996. The Aflatoun story began in 1991 after the riots in Mumbai when Jeroo initiated the educational organization MelJol. Over the years, the programme evolved from one focused solely on social issues to the inclusion of financial education. The materials for the Aflatoun program were developed on the ground in Indian primary and secondary schools. Strategy Childline acts like an intelligent switchboard, dispatching calls to optimize society's available child protection resources. Relying on existing infrastructures, the organization has capitalized on the recent spread of telecommunications in India and the emergence of a vast array of citizenship building organizations. Two advertising and consulting firms, Ogilvy & Mather and Tata Consultancy Services, have helped Childline develop its brand and franchise model. In 1998, India's Ministry of Justice and Social Empowerment committed to expanding Childline throughout the country. Having fielded over thirteen million calls, Childline serves as a powerful amplifier for the voices of children across India. Applying the same replication model as Child Helpline International, Billimoria’s more recent innovation, Aflatoun, works with schools and existing NGOS. Furthermore, the program employs the training tree method which achieves scale at low cost. The Aflatoun programme has already been proven to convey unexpected benefits including increased math ability and parental involvement. Jeroo believes that Child Social and Financial Education can do for children what microfinance has done for adults – stimulate entrepreneurship and empower them. The program is now operating in 20 countries reaching 250,000 children worldwide. The goal is to reach one million children by the year 2010. "Success," says Billimoria, "will be when every child in the world has access to Social and Financial Education and is empowered to determine their own future." The Entrepreneur Jeroo Billimoria was born in 1965 in Mumbai, India, to a family of professionals. Billimoria's mother instilled strong social convictions in her from a young age. She was eighteen when her father died. During the days following his death, long queues of local people formed to say their last goodbyes to a man who had been a 'quiet philanthropist' – so quiet that Billimoria had never realized he had reached out to help so many people. This realization led her to join the Tata Institute of Social Sciences rather than becoming a trained chartered accountant, as her father had been. Jeroo has been recognized internationally for her groundbreaking entrepreneurial work. One of her latest accolades was bestowed in 2006 by the Skoll Foundation as one of the winners of the Social Entrepreneurship Awards.
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