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So have you ever worked on a large jigsaw puzzle? It’s often tedious and many times the individual pieces look like they're just a collection of jumbled colors and distortions, but slowly as things start fitting, the scene becomes crystallized and you start seeing the big picture. For Priyanka Kamath, the founder and CEO of 100 Girls in Blockch(AI)n, the puzzle pieces are complex and numerous and the big picture is both imperative and important. Her mission has been to build skill equity for emerging economies and provide solutions for grassroots projects, with girls and women leading at the forefront. Now Priyanka’s puzzle began almost 10 years ago, when she was working on increasing digital literacy for girls and women in shelters, and she realized that education, empowerment, and deep investment is critical to build India’s Techade and a billion strong population of self-determined individuals with the emerging skills to get there! With her own background in systems engineering, corporate tech consulting and cybersecurity, and experiences at the World Bank, PepsiCo, and Novartis, Priyanka found that putting together the puzzle pieces required organizing at many different intersections, notably thinking about a model that is democratized and leveraging AI as a substrate for problem solving. She used the blockchain model first in 2022 to innovatively execute India’s 1st intensive all-women smart government contracted engineering cohort, and since then has led numerous cohorts and sessions, building lifetime momentum for over 2000 girls. What impressed me about 100 Girls in Block(AI)n, is that their adaptive solutions and practical problem solving is making the global big picture a lot sharper and more accessible. Priyanka’s award winning work and collaborations in India and abroad are having impact for many critical dyads: startups and institutions, rural and urban, tech naive and tech savvy, and finally for both individuals and teams, making financial inclusion and mobility more possible.
As a demo and capstone, on May 4th, she’s showcasing an event called the 100 GIGA demo day, the result of a 3 month bootcamp of girls building software solutions with AI innovations in healthcare, finance, agriculture, and education.
We caught up to chat about the many opportunities and the lessons from 100 Girls in Blockch(AI)n and we started our chat with some basic talk and explanation for a tech naive person like me about blockchain and generative AI…