Meet Founder Jeya Malhotra from Bangalore. She is a 15-year-old 10th grader, who developed her passion for entrepreneurship from when she got to know about social entrepreneurship and change making. Jeya learnt about entrepreneurship in class 7th and her mentor guided her to join a visionary student organization named Tinker Champs. It is a union of around 100 students, which collaborate with the Atal Innovation Mission, Niti Aayog, the Government of India. It conducts various online bootcamps, webinars and workshops for the students to foster the spirit of start-up and entrepreneurship amongst the youth. Via Tinker Champs, Jeya honed her skills in the domain of innovation, digital skilling, entrepreneurship and change making. She built Khwaish with the vision of helping mentally retarded children. Taking her journey into consideration, Jeya noticed that many people who want to create an impact in the world are only focusing on underprivileged children or providing students with the necessary digital skill mentoring. But intellectually challenged children are someone who go completely unnoticed. Jeya observed this problem and started working upon it. She realized that the parents of these intellectually challenged people have no one to seek guidance from and are sometimes seen helpless in such situations. So, she built Khwaish to serve the purpose. She is currently working with two other specialists in the same domain and are on their journey to build a product market fit. Since Jeya was trying her hands at something completely new, during the initial days, she wanted to have a validation for her idea. For this, she built a raw website and started submitting it for various competitions. Then during her 8th grade, in the ATL Tinkerpreneur 2023 competition, she bagged an All India Rank 1 amongst the 9000 start-up ideas that were competing against each other. That’s how she validated her idea! Soon she realized that instead of just putting out the website in competitions, it requires a bit more research. So, she is currently working on her Research and Development, as of now. She is in her MVP stage and will be launching the final product soon. She noticed that there were some challenges standing in the path too. According to Jeya, there is enthusiasm amongst the community to learn about the things. But the thing that is acting as a hindrance is that they don’t have the proper resources to execute what they have inside their heads. It’s accessibility that has become an obstacle. Jeya believes that a massive change can be brought by peer mentoring. Peer mentoring is a word that was brought in India by Atal Innovation Mission through their Mentor India program. It believes that students should mentor other students. When we teach something to someone else, we learn a lot from each other. From initial days only, Jeya wanted to engage in projects that could impact a larger audience. But she found that a lot of innovators around were focusing on more generic issues. So, she chose a field where she could impact the lives of mentally challenged children, which is what she really cared about. Social entrepreneurship has been her thing from the beginning. While Khwaish is still an MVP, it aims to help intellectually challenged children by providing community-based services, various offline and online resources and providing accessibility to good consulting. “There can be shared growth in peer mentoring. Mentoring has a two-way benefit, because when you teach something to someone you learn far a greater number of things than you already do.” - Jeya Malhotra (Founder at Khwaish)