Here is a number worth sitting with: India's crowdfunding market generated ₹400 crore in donations in 2024, and is growing at nearly 19% annually. A meaningful and growing slice of that activity is driven by school students — teenagers fundraising for causes ranging from solar energy to mid-day meal programmes to clean water access.
Here is another number: the platforms facilitating much of that student fundraising take between 9% and 24% of every rupee raised.
That gap — between what donors give and what reaches communities in need — is what Udayaa was built to close.
The scale of student-led fundraising in India
India has 276 IB schools and over 550 Cambridge/IGCSE schools, enrolling an estimated 120,000 high school students. A significant portion of these students are required to complete formal service-learning hours — through IB's Creativity, Activity, Service (CAS) programme, or equivalent community service frameworks in Cambridge schools. For many, running a fundraising campaign is how they fulfill that requirement.
FuelADream, the largest platform serving this specific school segment, publicly reports having run over 250 campaigns in its first 24 months of operation and claims to have helped raise more than ₹15 crores since launch. Its CEO confirmed running active partnerships with well-known schools including Chirec International (Hyderabad), Sishya (Chennai), DPS Gurgaon, and Shri Ram School Aravali, among 30 or more others. In one documented case, Chirec students raised over ₹1 crore in a single 14-day campaign for Akshaya Patra during the COVID-19 relief effort.
The student fundraising ecosystem in India is not a niche. It is substantial, active, and growing.
What those platforms actually charge
Most donors assume their money goes to the cause. On standard platforms, a meaningful share goes to the platform instead.
FuelADream charges a ₹3,000 setup fee per campaign plus 9% of total funds raised. On a standard ₹20,000 student campaign — the typical target set for school partnerships — that amounts to ₹4,800 extracted before a single rupee reaches the cause: an effective fee of 24%.
Other major Indian platforms have similar structures. Ketto charges 5–8% of funds raised plus payment gateway fees. Milaap has historically charged 5–8% in platform tiers. ImpactGuru charges 4.5–5.5% plus approximately 3% in transaction costs, adding up to roughly 7–8% total. A 2021 financial investigation found that fees and tips across Indian crowdfunding platforms "add up to around 15–16% of the amount raised" on average.
None of this is secret. But it is rarely made visible to the students running campaigns, or to the donors contributing to them.
What the numbers actually mean at scale
Here is where it becomes concrete.
If FuelADream's active school network produces approximately 1,500 student campaigns per year — a conservative estimate based on their own reported growth — and each campaign raises an average of ₹20,000, the total annual funds raised by students on that platform alone is approximately ₹3 crore.
At a 24% effective fee, that means roughly ₹72 lakh per year is going to the platform instead of to communities in need. Not because students chose that outcome. Because the infrastructure they were handed — often by their school, often as part of a curriculum requirement — was designed that way.
Scaled across the broader landscape of platforms where Indian students fundraise, the number is larger still. Ketto has hosted over 2,00,000 campaigns in total and raised ₹1,100 crore, averaging around 5–8% in fees. ImpactGuru has raised ₹1,500 crore, taking approximately 7–8%. Even at the lower end of those estimates, the cumulative fee extraction from Indian social-cause campaigns runs into hundreds of crores over time — funds that donors believed were going to impact.
The question nobody asks at the school assembly
The way school crowdfunding typically works is this: a platform representative presents to a grade or an assembly. They show videos of beneficiaries. They explain that students can each raise ₹20,000 for a pre-selected NGO — Akshaya Patra, Make-A-Wish, Greensole — using a template campaign page. The social pressure of a room full of peers and an implicit curriculum requirement does the rest. Sign-up rates of 50–80% of students present are not unusual.
What is rarely explained in that assembly: the setup fee the platform charges. The percentage taken from every donation. The fact that a ₹1,000 donation from a donor's perspective becomes somewhere between ₹760 and ₹910 by the time it reaches the NGO, depending on the platform.
Students are not told this. Donors are not told this. And because the NGO partners are large, credible organisations — Akshaya Patra has served over 1.8 million children daily — the campaign feels legitimate and the fee extraction goes unexamined.
What a zero-fee model actually enables
Udayaa operates as a Section 8 not-for-profit company. We charge students nothing to use the platform. We charge donors nothing on their contributions. 100% of every donation reaches the cause the student is building for.
That is not just a positioning statement. In concrete terms, it means:
A student who raises ₹20,000 on Udayaa delivers ₹20,000 to impact. The same campaign on FuelADream delivers ₹15,200. The ₹4,800 difference is not small — it is the cost of four months of school meals for one child under the Akshaya Patra programme.
Across 1,500 campaigns, that difference is ₹72 lakh. Across five years of growth, at the trajectory this sector is on, it is a number that runs into crores — every rupee of which could have funded the very causes students were trying to support.
The second problem: ownership
The fee structure is the quantifiable problem. But there is a second problem that is harder to measure and arguably more important.
When a student is handed a template campaign, assigned a pre-selected NGO, and given a standard ₹20,000 target by their school — they are completing an assignment, not building something. The research on this is consistent: campaigns driven by genuine personal ownership have higher donor engagement, higher completion rates, and more durable community relationships than template campaigns driven by institutional pressure.
The students who fundraise through school-mandated platforms often cannot tell you, six months later, what the money actually did. The students who design their own campaigns — who choose their cause, write their own story, build their own donor relationships — can tell you exactly. And they come back to do it again.
That difference compounds. One model produces a CAS credit. The other produces a changemaker.
Why this matters now
India's international school market is growing at 10% annually and is projected to reach $14.67 billion by 2030. The cohort of students who will go through service-learning programmes over the next decade is enormous. The infrastructure those students are handed — the platforms, the processes, the frameworks — will shape not just how much money reaches communities in need, but what kind of relationship an entire generation of young people develops with social impact.
If the infrastructure is fee-heavy, template-driven, and school-imposed, we will produce a generation that associates giving with obligation. If it is free, student-designed, and genuinely owned, we will produce something different.
That is the reason Udayaa exists. Not to compete for market share in the school crowdfunding space. To change what that space produces.
The numbers make the case. The rest is up to the students.
If you are a student with a cause, or a school administrator looking for a better model for service learning, reach out at udayaa.org. There is no setup fee, no platform percentage, and no template waiting for you.
