Embedded Files
In India, an estimated 35 million children are at-risk, facing significant risks to their development, education, and well-being. Most of these children take seven generations to break the cycle of poverty permanently. Existing support systems are fragmented, reactive, and inconsistent, with no mechanism ensuring continuous, long-term care for every child.
About the organisation
MAD is working towards a vision of a society where every child, regardless of their background, has access to consistent, caring mentorship, empowering them to thrive and rewrite their life story in a single generation. At the core of MAD is a proven model of care—college-going youth volunteers are trained as mentors and matched with at-risk children to provide sustained, multidimensional support across education, life skills, and career counselling. These relationships are deep, long and always empowering (begins when a child is 10 years old and lasts until they are an adult and financially independent). MAD uses technology as a strong operational backbone to work seamlessly across diverse contexts. It ensures that every child receives consistent support—even as mentors change—while also guiding and coaching mentors throughout their journey. At the same time, they also use innovative technology to capture rich impact stories, making visible the often unseen progress and transformation in a child’s life. Since 2006, MAD has mobilised 45,000 mentors to deliver mentorship to 7,500+ children across 20 cities. MAD’s model has made it 8 times more likely for a child born in poverty to move above the empowerment line by age 28.
Jithin Nedumala
Founder & CEO
Ashoka Fellow
Headquarters: India
Geographies: India
Domains: Education, Livelihoods, Equity
Journey of Exponential Change
Building on their proven model, MAD is exploring pathways to solve this at societal scale. A key realisation: they need not remain only a direct implementor, but take on the role of orchestrator — building the infrastructure in which thousands of care networks can emerge
The Big Quest:
How can we catalyse a network of caring communities to transition all at-risk children out of poverty permanently?
MAD's approach is a layered care infrastructure that moves from crisis response to prevention, reaching 300K at-risk children across urban India by 2028:
Community entry points: Small peer circles where young people find community, purpose, and agency — growing into larger groups that become self-organising communities of mentors. Any young person can start one in their college or neighbourhood.
Regular community gatherings: Monthly events where families, children, mentors, and local stakeholders — principals, employers, doctors — build real relationships and identify community challenges together.
Self-governing local networks: When young people commit to sustained, weekly presence in a community, they form a local care network. Clusters of networks in a region govern themselves — breaking dependence on the national centre.
A technology platform that coordinates fifteen-year mentoring journeys across mentor transitions, maps community assets to children's needs, and makes impact transparent enough to unlock trust-based funding.
A transparent funding mechanism where anyone — local communities, corporates, diaspora, foundations — can fund at the community level with full visibility into where resources go and what they produce.
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