AforAccounts.com, a platform which contains 700+ digital lectures library to help provide quality education free of cost to commerce stream students is a brainchild of Priya Bangard, a Chartered Accountant (C.A) by profession.
Priya Bangard who hails from the city of Jodhpur in Rajasthan has seen many people struggling for access to quality education. She co-founded this venture with Vishakha Modi, a post graduate in Accounting and also a Law graduate and Ratish Modi, who is an educationist by profession.
AforAccounts, which is an entirely self-funded initiative till date, encompasses syllabus of Standard 11th and 12th commerce stream with a focus to strengthen the fundamentals of accounts.
Today Priya along with Vishakha work towards the content creation and also respond to student queries while Ratish handles the technical aspects of creating digital lectures with external help.
So what prompted Priya to start this venture? Priya points out that metro cities have provisions for tuition, extra classes, etc. But small towns and rural and semi-urban areas have their own problems. “Either, there is a dearth of good teachers or quality education, and if at all they exist, then they are not in reach of every student coming from different financial backgrounds,” says Priya. With her flair for teaching, Priya decided to give back to the society. And what could be a better way than educating the needy students, that too free of cost. After much brainstorming the result was AforAccounts.com, aimed to provide free of cost 24×7 learning facility to the students while also allowing them to have total control over the way they learn and revise.
“A major effort has been spent in ensuring that the content is relevant for the students. Creation of board-wise content specifically as per the syllabus has been a major task. Our team also tried to see that the students focus more on concept building rather than just test scores. AforAccounts.com provides individual dashboard to each and every student so that they can track their progress,” explains Priya.
So will AforAccounts make the Accountancy lectures available for graduate, post-graduate and CA students or expand to other streams such as Economics, Mathematics, Management? “We have plans in (the) pipeline to expand the content for all the levels of commerce education step-by-step and gradually provide the content for allied subjects as well. But as the digital content creation along with website maintenance is an expensive procedure, AforAccounts.com is now open towards donations,” says Priya.
The initial days of AforAccounts was a struggle and arranging funds was a herculean task. But in spite of it all, Priya wants to keep the content always free for the students. “The expansion to be undertaken would depend largely upon the donations received,” said Priya.Today the team receives numerous texts and telephone calls from students for clarifications, sometimes even late at night. Answering all of them with limited resources has been an effort in itself.
More than 2000 students across India are getting help from AforAccounts.com today and these numbers are within a year of establishment. Priya’s team wants to expand its reach but is more inclined towards donations instead of investments. The reason behind this she clarifies is, “If the team vouch for investors, the investors in turn would definitely like to have returns on their investment, which in turn would pressurise us to make the content paid one, and we are not willing to do so.”
