Anaxee receives $1M to solve vaccine hesitancy in rural India, aims to generate 50,000 jobs

With its network of 20,000+ on-field Digital Runners, Anaxee Digital Runners is a tech-based platform that helps businesses, corporates to scale in Tier-II, III, and IV towns by using its vast network of Digital Runners.

It is also providing digital assistance to rural citizens helping them with the CoWIN portal, downloading vaccination certificates, booking appointments, etc. This project will employ 50,000 Digital Runners and aims to reach one crore rural citizens.

Through its campaign, Project Swaraksha, Anaxee is addressing vaccine hesitancy in remote areas and aims to get around 10 lakh people to volunteer to receive their first dose of the vaccine.

“Once we started Swaraksha, it was just a matter of time we found the perfect partners in Sandeep Nailwal and Punit Agarwal from the Crypto Relief Community. Crypto Relief is focused on deploying funds of $400+ million on COVID-19 relief works in India through various implementation agencies,” said Govind Agrawal, Co-founder and CEO of Anaxee Digital Runners Pvt. Ltd.

"In Phase-1 of Project Swaraksha, United Way of Bengaluru (UWBe) committed $1 million targeting 10 lakh rural citizens using funds from its donor Crypto Relief," he added.

When the villagers were learning to navigate through the process of registering themselves on CoWIN, the government opened vaccination for 18+ age brackets, increasing the demand for vaccination and limited supply. At the time, misinformation and rumours about COVID-19 vaccines combined with the unavailability of slots created a virtual barrier amongst the rural population.

Dejected by this, Anaxee took it upon itself to digitally assist the rural population for vaccination. For the last one month, the company’s Digital Runners are working on the ground assisting people from remote areas, while addressing vaccine hesitancy due to the misinformation about the vaccinations.

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The villagers are being counselled one-on-one and the Runners are ensuring successful vaccinations. The Runners are able to connect to the people, solve their queries, assist them through the entire process from booking appointments to finally getting their vaccination certificates.

Each Runner goes through structured training and assessment before they start working. They need to report each activity on Anaxee App and get paid for every successful vaccination. Through this programme, Anaxee plans to generate employment opportunities for 50,000 rural youth in the next six months

In less than 40 days, Project Swaraksha has already reached 85,000 villagers across 22 states, 185 districts, and 1,250 Tehsils with more than 3,000 runners registered.

“Deploying our resources was never an issue during COVID-19 since the majority of our operational management happens via our app. I think being technologically sound and data-driven from the start proved really helpful in materialising a task of this monumental scale,” said Govind.

Apart from Anaxee, a lot of other NGOs connected with Crypto Relief are also providing their volunteers in Project Swaraksha. Few State and Districts government have also shown interest in getting into MOU with Anaxee to implement the project in their geography.

Recently, Anaxee signed an MOU with the Mon District, Government of Nagaland. Thavaseelan K, IAS, Deputy Commissioner, Mon, was instrumental in bringing Project Swaraksha to Mon district.