Daniela Gheorghe is 30-year-old professional born in Romania, Eastern Europe, and she has lived in India for almost five years now - in the real India surrounded by local people, not in one of the tourist destinations. During this time she has worked in the fields of marketing, business development and operations in five states: Rajasthan, Assam, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka. And her work spans across four sectors including income generation for rural weavers, rural healthcare, waste management and education.
Why India? She came to Jaipur in 2011 for an international internship with AIESEC, a student-led global organisation. She chose India because India to her, the second daughter of a middle-class family in democratic Romania, was far more different, difficult and incredible.
Additionally, India is a hub of social innovations and it is here where she learned what she wants to do with my life - that she wanted to develop herself as a social entrepreneur. She got inspired by jugaad - which she define as the use of limited resources to create intelligent solutions for urgent problems.
In Rajasthan, She worked in the marketing and branding sector with Indias largest exporter of handmade carpets. she collaborated with Harvard Business School teams, met weavers across villages of Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan and discovered the trend of social entrepreneurship: how to use market forces to drive social impact in peoples lives.
Two years later in Assam, She collaborated with a local ophthalmologist to obtain an investment of Rs. 70 lakh for his eye care company. They created the business plan and won national recognition for a hub and spoke model of eye clinics in the villages around Jorhat. They also offered cataract surgery services at prices three times less than the market price.
She came to Bengaluru in 2014. It was time for her to take an operational role in a very difficult sector: waste management in Telangana. As a Frontier Market Scout, she joined a social enterprise with the mission to transform waste into organic fertiliser for farmers to revive their soil condition. It was one of the most challenging experiences. Her role was to improve operations and bring in operational standards that would increase efficiency. She sat on landfills with young women who start their day at 6 am to collect recyclable materials. They had been in debt for years after taking informal loans from scrap dealers for their childrens education.
This way, during the last five years She had the chance to work closely with some of the most underprivileged people in the country - waste-pickers in Telangana, rural women in Assam, and weaver families in rural Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.
One thing She noticed is that most parents aspire to send their children to a low-cost English-medium school. This was when she decided to start working in the field of education.
Why education?
The world is facing a global learning crisis. Four in 10 children in developing countries fail to learn the basics by the time they finish four years in school (UNESCO, 2012). We have to stop talking about how many teachers or schools we need and start talking about how much we need children to learn, and how we can enable teachers to help children learn in limited resource settings.
After few months she met her co- founder Anil Bishnoi, who just happened to be an Android developer and Vchalk was born.
Vchalk solution relies on classroom support for the teachers who take remedial classes. This is where technology can make a huge difference.
They are crowdfunding their startups.
India is now home for her.
