Anita Kumar, Head – Amazon in the Community, CSR for Amazon India, is a global philanthropy organisation within Amazon. After introducing the story of Poonam Kamble, a 7th grader from a government school on the outskirts of Pune who dreams of becoming a police officer when she grows up, we are shown the beginnings of Amazon Future Engineering – the signature program of Amazon.

A new leadership principle within Amazon – ‘Success and scale bring broad responsibility’ now guides the organisation to use their efforts to reach for good. Their customers are between 10 and 24 year old underserved, underprivileged & underrepresented young people. Within the Amazon ecosystem they have the biggest mobile first population making it easier to reach the audience. Most programs are built for laptops and computers and are available in various local languages etc. Amazon Future Engineering is the philanthropy program empowering every child to be a creator. This program focuses on technology and creating creators of technology. The vision of this program is to enable computer science education for all.

It allows kids to explore the world of computer science, using class chats to delve into challenges, allowing children to become problem solvers using coding.It allows deeper learning in schools with quality curriculums, through teacher, technology and curriculum development. It builds tech careers for students through scholarships and internships.Through a series of interventions children are now able to create, participate in robotic competitions and code at competitive levels.

Over the last 2 years Amazon has also donated infrastructure in the form of laptops, smart phones, tablets, computer labs to over 900 government schools across 7 states benefitting over 1.5 lakh students through the ‘Digital Device Donation’ program, including over 85 Non profits.

Amazons biggest focus has been on how to work the customer backwards and to leverage what Amazon has to offer from market place technology, AWS cloud, Amazon pay etc, to see what can be done for students and how to make relevant content and products that can be taken from India to a global market.

It is through a strong backbone of computer science and education experts that Amazon understands their students, their reality and tries to create an impact.