“AS A YOUNG WOMAN, PEOPLE DON’T TAKE YOU SERIOUSLYAT FIRST”

IPriya Prakash founded HealthSetGo, an NGO, to help schools achieve global standards of health monitoring of their students. head India’s largest health organisation for schools that aims to create the country’s largest network of healthy schools and inculcate lifelong healthy behaviour in children. Despite the fact that the country is on its way to becoming the diabetes capital of the world, we still shy away from talking about health in classrooms.

want to bring Indian schools at par with the growth monitoring of students that is done at the school level in other countries. Through HealthSetGo’s flagship product, CARE, we’ve been able to standardise and automate annual health assessments at member schools by bringing in doctors to comprehensively assess the child’s health and deliver online, easy-to-understand reports to parents. In fact, our organisation even follows up after the assessment to ensure that the parent has taken corrective measures. Thanks to our innovative student-teacher-driven health activities every month, based on the World Health Organisation Health Days, we create a lively ecosystem in which the conversation about health stays alive. We have tie-ups with 16 hospitals, 90 doctors and 35 clinics across the country. We have already impacted the lives of more than 20,000 children across India.

Being a young entrepreneur, more so when you are a woman, can sometimes be tough as people seldom take you seriously. You have to put in an extra effort to convince them that you can deliver and are capable of handling things responsibly. One has to prove herself constantly, almost every day.

Determination and persistent hard work have been my companions ever since I established HealthSetGo two years ago. Believing that a sizeable number of people are open to new ideas and novel methods of implementation, I have found a niche which is willing to listen to—and work on— my ideas.”

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