As India is marching ahead in the digital era with faster internet and up-to-date smart phones, questions are often being raised as how the senior citizens are faring in this regard. The one-way digital progress has highlighted the digital divide as well. Thankfully, Aparna Thakker’s Empowerji App is a new ray of hope for the citizens of India.
Empowerji, is a unique empowering brand that solely focuses on teaching senior citizens how to use technology as opposed to selling something. As of now, the Empowerji Team has built multi-lingual basic learning videos in Hindi, Marathi, English and Gujarati which can be freely accessed from the app.
The credit of Empowerji goes to Aparna Thakker. Thakker completed her schooling and engineering in Mumbai and later pursued her Electronics Engineering from Southern Methodist University. Later, she also pursued a Masters in Telecommunications degree. Soon after completing her graduation, Thakker started working for Nortel in Dallas, TX, in CDMA R&D. In 2008, she took a transfer to Nortel Mumbai in Optical. Later, she completed her MBA in Mumbai from Welingkar Institute of Management. In 2010 Thakker took a sabbatical and later co-founded KoolKampus – a cloud-based educational suite.
Thakker has always been keen on creating something which will send across positive ripples in the society. The idea of working in this area led to the creation of Empowerji. In fact, she presented this idea at the MIT Entrepreneurship Bootcamp in 2017, which was well received. As Thakker always says, “Technology is for everyone to experience and with little handholding, our elders can also reap the benefits of tech”.
Empowerji was born in 2018.
Currently, it is based on a Freemium model with a subscription-based service. The App is free for most tech-learning content. It has already attracted a teaching target group of 30- to 45-year-old influencers, and 50 years and above end users.
Empowerji is driven by the commitment to connect customers with precisely the kind of services senior citizens are looking for. By leveraging technology and investing in constant innovation, it offers awareness and general digital literacy to the senior citizens. The team regularly conducts connected workshops in the city, along with some offline events.
At present, Empowerji serves customers located anywhere in India and receives data from seminars in Mumbai. The company will soon be expanding its services to other parts of the country and will be increasing seminars in six months’ time. Empowerji also aims to bring more customers on-board to find answers to all their needs through the portal.
The app is compatible on both Android and iOS platforms.
Download link for Android – https://play.google.com
Download link for iOS- https://itunes.apple.com
Reference tutorial videos- www.youtube.com
