Leading The Skilling Revolution

Divya Jain is a social entrepreneur who has worked to disrupt the supply chain and logistics industry through innovative and nationwide skill de­velopment programmes. She is the founder and CEO of Safeducate, India’s largest supply chain skilling company.

Instead of joining her family busi­ness, which happens to be Safexpress Group, one of India’s largest supply chain and lo­gistics company, Jain decided to expand the group’s impact on the supply chain and logistics industry by addressing a key issue that hugely affected the industry — the un­availability of skilled manpower to operate and manage various supply chain and lo­gistics activities. A social activist but astute entrepreneur, Jain has built an organisation with more than 500 employees and over 150 centres across the country. At present, Safe­ducate skills over 50,000 youths ever year.

Always keen on innovating, Jain started using scrapped shipping containers to create India’s first container school with a mission to drive skilling and outreach programmes in the remote areas of the country a few years ago. Created at a minimal cost, India’s first container school built by Jain was inaugurated by Prime Minister, Naren­dra Modi, while unveiling his Skill India Program three years ago at Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi.

Now, a lot of other players who have been inspired by Jain’s inno­vation, have developed several such mobile con­tainer schools to create quality infrastructure in India’s hinterlands.

“The Safeducate centres have been cho­sen to provide training to the most deprived areas of India (such as Odisha, Bihar, the Northeast region). Safeducate works closely with the local community around these cen­tres to promote livelihood creation through skilling and job placements. By using the lat­est technology, innovative tools and with its rich pool of experienced, qualified and cer­tified trainers, and subject matter experts, Safeducate displays a unique ability to de­velop and transform the lives of its different types of learners through highly focused and industry relevant courses, programmes and workshops,” says Jain.

Jain believes that being chosen for ‘BW 40 Under 40’ is a great honour and feels deeply gratified for the same. In her view, the work being done by Safeducate is extremely vital, given India’s demographics at present, and this honour provides her a fantastic platform to not just showcase her work but also to raise public awareness towards its necessity.

Safeducate plans to skill a million people over the next ten years through its 150 insti­tutes set up across India. Jain is focusing on edtech products to scale skilling beyond the current brick-and-mortar training model. She is certain that technologies such as ar­tificial intelligence and virtual reality will bring massive transformation in education in the next few years, and she wants to be at the forefront leading this revolution.

Having worked very closely with the supply chain and logistics indus­try, Jain realised the huge role played by the truck drivers in the growth of the industry as well as the Indian economy. To bring out the amazing stories of these unsung heroes of Indian economy, Jain has even authored a book on the life of truck drivers, Horn Please: Trucking in India. This thought-provoking book has been featured by the prestigious ‘Limca Book of Records’ as India’s First Ever Coffee Table Book on Trucking.

As a role model for women from all walks of life and as a businesswoman, Jain con­tinues to inspire more and more women to come forward and pursue their dreams in an otherwise male-dominated society. As a founder and CEO, she believes that people work for relationship and purpose way more than money, and everyone has the ability to bring about change, you just have to keep motivating them.