WHEELS is striving to identify, engage, and support a diverse mix of promising projects that cover our six domains of focus, align with interests of our global diverse alumni community, have already shown promising results, and a credible on-the-ground partner, and have an exciting scaling runway to millions of beneficiaries.
Given near-existential challenges faced by humanity, there are hundreds of sustainability-oriented entities (non-profits, NGOs, for-profit impact businesses, public bodies) stepping up to drive new innovations and solutions deployment and global scaling. WHEELS model is not to duplicate any of those efforts and waste precious resources. Rather, our focus is help address gaps and be a key scaling catalyst in accelerating the journey to a sustainable world. We intend to address the gaps by leveraging our massive alumni ecosystem’s power – products & services, technologies & innovations, business & financial models – all visible and within reach of our alumni working at early-stage start-ups to Global 100 corporations. Further, we see opportunities to address the gaps by sponsoring targeted research at our family of IITs. We intend to materially impact the scaling trajectory by fully leveraging our unique position of a connector of this large ecosystem of 400,000+ alumni and 23 IITs – leveraging the technology & business knowledge & resources, financial capacity, network relationships with dozens of entities of all flavors worldwide.
663 million people still rely on unimproved water sources.1 in 3 people globally do not have access to safe drinking water.
– World Health Organization
3.4 billion people live in areas at risk of malaria transmission in 106 countries and territories.
– Center for Disease Control (CDC)
Only 2% of humanitarian aid goes to education. Providing all children with quality basic education could boost annual economic growth by 2% in low-income countries.
– United Nations (UN)
Around 1.1 billion people worldwide still live without access to electricity with most concentrated in Africa and Asia.
– The World Bank
1 billion people 32% of the global
urban population – live in urban slums.
– United Nations (UN)
2.7 billion people rely on the traditional use of
biomass for cooking, which causes harmful indoor
air pollution.
– World Energy Outlook 2015
A connected, smart village is
the foundation for a thriving,
progressive society.
