About Awaaz De

In 2012, Dr. Neil Patel decided to look beyond his home state of California and apply his Stanford University Ph.D. research to pressing problems in international development. He arrived in India, to find that communication platforms were driven by basic phones and the medium of voice could overcome basic barriers of literacy and language to both disseminate contextual content and collect data. His thesis on a prototype for such a system for small farmers in Gujarat soon became one of the most referenced in the ICT4D space. His advisor, Dr. Tapan Parikh at UC, Berkeley, suggested they start a company to scale the clear impact this system could have on the way rural communications worked in the development sector. With an aim to bridge the communication divide for underserved last-mile users, Awaaz.De was born in Ahmedabad.