A telecom company's foundation, doing what a telecom company can uniquely do - and then rather more.
Dollu Foundation was set up in 2019 by Dollu Ltd to close the gap between having coverage and being connected. We have since grown into 15 programme areas, because a connected village with unsafe water is not a developed one.
7
Years running
11
States
87%
Spent on programmes
Coverage is not access.
Our parent company builds networks. Building them taught us something uncomfortable: a village can sit inside a coverage map and still be, in every way that matters, offline. No usable connection at the school. No device a child can practise on. Nobody in the household who has filled in an online form before.
The Foundation started there, because it is the problem we are least likely to get wrong. We fund and maintain connectivity at the places a whole village can reach - schools, health centres, panchayat offices - and we stay to keep them running, which is the part almost everyone skips.
Then we widened. It became obvious that a school with a working lab and no safe water, or a woman with a certificate and nowhere safe to live near the job, was not a success. So today we work across 15 areas, from nutrition and elderly care to animal welfare and heritage - while keeping the discipline that came from engineering: fund the second year, measure late, publish what failed.
Five things that shape every decision.
Fund the second year
Anyone can cut a ribbon. We budget maintenance, stipends and repairs at the point of installation, because the projects that fail almost never fail on day one.
Publish the bad numbers
Survival rates at three years, retention at twelve months, referrals actually confirmed. We report these even when they are worse than we hoped, because a sector that only publishes successes teaches nobody anything.
The community decides
Where a panchayat's priority is not something we fund, that is a legitimate answer. We do not substitute our own plan for a village's.
Do what only we can
There are better nutrition organisations than us. There are very few foundations that can put a working link into a flooded district in twelve hours. We lean into that.
Nobody is a photograph
We do not publish images or stories of the people we work with without informed, revocable consent, and never of a child in a way that identifies them.
The detail, if you want it.
How we work
The principles behind every programme, and what we refuse to do.
Our history
From three districts in 2019 to 11 states.
People and board
Who is accountable for what.
Governance
How decisions and money are controlled.
Transparency
Accounts, spend share and the numbers we publish.
Careers
Working at the Foundation.
Fund a district, or send us your old laptops.
We are a mid-sized foundation and we say so. If we are not the right organisation for what you want to do, we will tell you and suggest who is.
