TechCamp participants have the opportunity to take advantage of some unique opportunities provided exclusively to our participants from our private sector partners & trainers. Two recent TechCamp alumni – Anushka Jain, CEO of Share At Door Step and Monika Shukla, Co-founder @ LetsEndorse – are examples of this, as they were able to use free Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits to ramp up their online businesses.
TechCamp South Asia, held in September of 2018, connected Indian and Pakistani women, social entrepreneurs, to collaborate on and build new digital tools to improve the work they are doing for their communities. Dave Williams, a TechCamp South Asia trainer from Amazon Web Services, was able to offer 10k in AWS credits to those participants.
Jain’s business, Share At Door Step, is an e-commerce platform that allows users to donate goods and earn rewards. Jain used the TechCamp AWS credits for a virtual server behind her website, where customers can take advantage of a real-time order-placement system that she can easily manage using an online database on the cloud. After TechCamp, she now plans to use tools like “auto-scaling groups”, which would help her adapt her site to the right amount of traffic in the most cost-effective way. “I can’t tell you how many times I have thanked you in my head and did that happy dance (for the credits),” she said.
Shukla’s social venture called Let’s Endorse is an online network and digital ecosystem of social entrepreneurs and technology that helps mobilize social innovations to solve challenges in needed communities. “Our entire application is now hosted on AWS, thanks to the credits,” she explained. “Works like a charm!”
This is just one of the many opportunities that are unique to TechCamp participants. TechCamp alumni typically receive personalized in-person and virtual training from experts, apply and compete for small grants to help them build out their projects, launch community organizations or NGOs, host their own mini-TechCamps, build websites & apps, create new networks of expertise, and more.
Questions? Contact us at techcamp@state.gov
