Solve Ninja Bootcamps

Across India, local residents know best how civic and environmental issues affect them. They can have the best ideas for addressing them. But neighborhood-scale change is often dismissed as unimportant or small. Less than 1% of the world’s largest democratic population of 1.3 billion people is actively engaged in its democratic system and civic action. 

Therefore, nearly every community and neighborhood across India carry the burdens of dysfunction every day; failing infrastructure, stagnancy in development, dangerous policies and wasteful behaviors on the part of the citizenry and local elected representatives.

We will enable the world’s highest rate in civic participation in India and help co-create active citizens that see local civic problem solving as a fundamental responsibility. We will seed a cadre of young Indians (called Solve Ninjas) as citizen leaders who will mobilize action-based democratic, civic participation and an activated citizenry.

We will do this by building a “civic muscle” in young people to solve local community problems. This muscle is activated and built by solving local issues through:

1. Local Data: Understanding and crowdsourcing local data to solve local issues

2. Local Solutions: Implementing or designing local solutions 

3. Local Campaigns: Implement or starting local campaigns

We provide a citizen engagement platform that trains and supports new and existing civic leaders, who we call “Solve Ninjas” to drive neighborhood change. They do this by engaging local communities with:

1. Local data.

2. Local solutions.

We onboard youth in the age group of 12 – 25, using our tech-enabled platform and take them through our DISS methodology where they Discover issues that are present in their neighborhood, Investigate the problem by collecting quantitative and qualitative data about the problem, Solve the problem by campaigning, finding or building products and solutions or Reporting the issues to authorities and then Share their data and solutions to stakeholders and other Solve Ninjas.

We want to create an impact at three levels: Individual, Community, and at the Systemic Level.

1. At the Individual level, we want to create one million Solve Ninjas by 2025. We would like these to Solve Ninjas to take at least two or more civic actions every year, and we want to see their problem solving and other 21st century skills increasing.
2. At the Community level, we would like to see an increase in citizen engagement; measured by an increase in the number of civic actions taken, campaigns started and resolved, and prototype solutions built. We would also like to see and measure the impact on environmental savings - measured in terms of liters of water saved, or garbage saved from landfills, or units of electricity saved, etc.
3. At the Systemic level, we would like to see at least 5% of our Solve Ninjas become civic leaders and also see the 74th Amendment of the Constitution be implemented in spirit.