2026 PRME Education Award

Dr. Snigdha Malhotra, Fortune Institute of International Business (FIIB), New Delhi, India

Prof Vibhor Kataria, Fortune Institute of International Business (FIIB), New Delhi, India

At FIIB, the SDGs are not reported against, they organise what we teach, whom we partner with, and how we hold ourselves accountable. Our contribution to responsible management education rests on a single conviction: that students who graduate without having encountered the real consequences of organisational decisions on marginalised communities are not fully prepared to lead. The Social Internship Program (SIP) is the operational expression of that conviction, a graded, curriculum-integrated field placement that moves students through four deliberately sequenced phases: values formation through UNSDG sensitisation, SDG-aligned placement with grassroots social sector organisations, supervised field immersion where students co-design and execute real management interventions, and public knowledge dissemination through the annual SIP Mela. Each phase is purposefully constructed so that responsible management is not an add-on to the PGDM experience but constitutive of it, academically valorised, formally assessed, and faculty-mentored with the same rigour as any other curriculum component. And because we believe institutional commitment must extend beyond graduation, we have built deliberate systems to track, recognise, and re-engage alumni advancing social and environmental impact professionally closing the loop between campus formation and career practice, and ensuring that each generation of students sees, in proximate and credible form, that responsible leadership is not an aspiration but a demonstrated reality.

SIP is designed on a foundational belief that the deepest professional skills — stakeholder empathy, adaptive problem-solving, cross-sector communication, and the capacity to manage with accountability to communities beyond shareholders — cannot be developed in a classroom alone. They require genuine consequence. By placing students inside resource-constrained, socially complex organisations where the stakes are viscerally real, SIP creates the conditions for a categorically different kind of learning: one where students are not simulating management decisions but making them, not studying stakeholder dynamics but navigating them. The four-phase design is intentional in this regard — the pre-placement UNSDG sensitisation moves students from information to personal values commitment; the SDG-aligned matching ensures every placement demands and rewards management expertise; the fifteen-day field immersion, structured around co-designed projects under dual faculty and field supervision, builds project planning, financial modelling, marketing strategy, and organisational design competencies in environments where these skills produce tangible outcomes for real communities; and the SIP Mela requires students to synthesise, articulate, and defend their learning in a public forum, building the communication and reflective competencies that professional life demands. The evidence of this development is not merely self-reported, our SSO partners rate student contributions 4.3 out of 5, and students themselves consistently describe SIP as the most formative learning experience of their entire management programme, not because it was the most technically demanding, but because it was the most humanly consequential. That distinction is, in itself, a measure of the kind of professional formation that responsible management education is meant to achieve.

SIP is replicable not because it is simple, but because its underlying logic is transferable. The model rests on three principles that any management institution can adopt regardless of size, geography, or resource base: that experiential learning must be structurally integrated into the curriculum rather than offered as a voluntary add-on; that community partnerships must be curated with institutional rigour rather than assembled for convenience; and that student engagement with society must be academically valorised - assessed, mentored, and held to the same standard as any other programme component. Any institution that accepts these principles can build a version of this framework. The four-phase design - sensitisation, SDG-aligned placement, supervised field immersion is sufficiently structured to ensure educational rigour while remaining flexible enough to accommodate diverse social sector contexts, institutional sizes, and student cohort profiles. Equally importantly, the model demonstrates that scale and quality are not in tension: over nine years and across sixty-six partner organisations, FIIB has sustained stakeholder satisfaction scores without regression - proof that a service-learning programme can grow in ambition and reach without sacrificing depth.

Educate for Impact | The New Non-Negotiable