Deutsche Bank to provide engineering scholarships to 200 meritorious girl students

NEW DELHI: Deutsche Bank and Smile Foundation partner to provide engineering scholarships to 200 meritorious young women from low-income households to pursue their education in engineering. The selected students will receive funding for a four-year engineering course.

The courses will be at select colleges in Bengaluru, Jaipur, Mumbai, and Pune. The scholarship programme will be providing students the support required until the completion of their course. Smile Foundation and the bank will conduct half-yearly training programmes to upskill these the recipients. After completing their course, the students will also be given industry experience, support, and guidance for job placements.

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The programme received nearly 1,100 applications from students studying in over 50 college across the four mentioned cities. The process of conducting orientation sessions and selecting the recipients for the scholarship, was undertaken meticulously by more than 150 volunteers from the bank and the foundation.

The scholarship is a part of Deutsche Bank and Smile Foundation collaboration. The organisations formally handed over the scholarship letters and laptops at individual events across Deutsche Bank offices in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, and Jaipur. Other than senior management of the bank, also present at the event were parents of the girls and their college principals.

While speaking about women empowerment in the industry, Deutsche Bank Group, CEO, Kaushik Shaparia said: “As a country with a burgeoning female workforce, there is an urgent need to ensure equitable distribution of economic resources and to provide equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision making in political, economic, and public life. As a bank, we believe in supporting initiatives that would create a larger talent pool that would help support our vision towards nation building. Our scholarship will help develop a generation of women technocrats and build gender collaboration to sustain a buoyant and thriving economy.”

“We are grateful for our long-standing partnership with Deutsche Bank which has helped us bring to life, the dreams of these young women. Our efforts are in line with the government’s agenda of educating the girl child and we are actively seeking to create a gender-balanced leadership by increasing the share of women in technical positions in business through such programmes,” said Smile Foundation, Executive Director, Vikram Singh Verma.