ARISE.

The organisation

ARISE stands for Action for Rural Inclusion and Socio-Economic Empowerment. It teaches women who have been shut out of banking how to manage money, then helps them use it through self-help groups, bank accounts, and microloans. It was founded by Rhea Jain. I joined to run the technology.

It started in rural Maharashtra with a self-help group of thirteen women. They were guided through getting microloans and used them to start small businesses, such as tailoring and home cooking. Every new programme follows that same model. Programmes now run in India and the Philippines, organised from Singapore, and Vietnam is being prepared next.

What I do

I am responsible for all of the technology, part-time alongside school. That means the public website, the system for signing up and onboarding volunteers, and the surveys and dashboards that show what changed for participants. I also manage the technology and social media volunteers and help recruit people for new countries.

• Websitearisewomen.cc, served by a Node and Express server I wrote.
• SecurityA Content Security Policy built automatically from the page’s own scripts, so it never falls out of date.
• VolunteersOnboarding for Partnership Head, Education Lead, Country Lead, and Social Media Creator roles.
• ImpactSurveys before and after each programme, feeding dashboards that show the change.
• SearchStructured data, a sitemap, and robots rules so partners and volunteers can find us.
• ToolsClaude Code and MCP integrations for day-to-day work by the volunteer team.

Building for volunteers

Everything I build has to keep running while I am in class, and the next person to use it is probably a volunteer who joined last week. So I avoid anything complicated. I automate what I can, use ordinary tools, and make sure that when something fails it is obvious, rather than failing quietly.

Results

In 2026 ARISE won a $2,500 grant from the IB Global Youth Action Fund, chosen from over 1,100 applicants in 40 countries. The application was built on the impact data our surveys collected.

Programmes have now reached more than 600 people, with an average 63% improvement in financial-literacy scores between the start and end of a programme.