Mumbai: A bunch of ninth-grade children around a table are creating an app that can inform teachers in real time — and not just before the exams — about whether students have absorbed their lessons. Amruth Ravindranath, founder of teacher empowerment platform Guru-G Learning Labs, is impressed: “Having been in the field of education for quite some time, if something surprises me, it means the idea amounts to something.”
At another table, another group of kids animatedly discuss how farmers can be brought into the formal banking system. Vinay Kumar, COO of Digital Green, a platform that leverages technology to reach out to small farmers, proudly displays a prototype of a cheque that the students have created with cardboard and sketch pens.
The 73 students from around 15 schools in India (Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Surat) and Jordan were part of a three-day Global Social Entrepreneurship Summit. They were mentored by seasoned social entrepreneurs, and learnt how to create their own social enterprises that can be sustainable, scalable and fundable.
Unleashing creativity
The students were mixed into groups, encouraging them to form new friendships, collaborate and be creative, and learn skills like critical thinking and design thinking. Each group had a focus area drawn from the UN’s sustainable development goals — cities and communities, quality education, clean water and sanitation, agriculture — and created a social enterprise in their category.
The children began by learning how to empathise with their audiences, and figuring out which of the multiple challenges within their domains to focus on. They were then taught to come up with a ‘problem statement’ addressing a social or functional aspect of the issue. This was followed by an ideation session on different ways to solve the problem with a social enterprise. Next step: prototyping and deciding on which enterprise they wanted to create a business plan for, based on a template.
The instinct to do good
“They’re very passionate about those enterprises,” says Dr. Shabbi Luthra, CEO, Consilience, the education consultancy which organised the conclave. “The level of engagement is very high because you can’t come in here just to get a grade or a certificate. You’re coming here because you want to make a difference in the world. The ones who are inheriting the world have to have skills as well as abilities to take it to the next level, and it’s our responsibility to provide them those skills.”
Rishi Aggarwal, an urban planning and environmental issues advocate of the Mumbai Sustainability Center, says he didn’t have to hard-sell social entrepreneurship to these children, even though, to them, public transport or housing may not be issues in the first place. “They’ve grown up around million-dollar startups, so those have little novelty for them. But now, the real, complex problems of the world — related to development or agriculture — have their own allure and offer challenges.” And starting young has its advantages: “Once you have these building blocks, you can get in at your pace and decide whether you want to devote your life to it.”
D. Stalin, who runs environmental non-profit Vanashakti in Mumbai, is more blunt: “My generation has ruined the planet. The children need to be told in black and white, ‘We’ve put you in a dangerous situation, now you need to fight for yourselves, stem the rot and try to recover something for your future generations.’”
Theirs is the world
Some of the students showed a deep understanding of issues belying their ages. “My parents discuss things like farmer suicides, and I know about it from them,” says Nita Kumar (14), from Bombay Cambridge School (all the children’s names have been changed to protect their privacy, at the request of the organisers). Her group decided to look at what causes suicides, and zeroed in on indebtedness as a primary reason. Their idea: bypass moneylenders and improve farmers’ access to formal finance by crediting payment for their produce directly into bank accounts; this would generate a credit history, which would in turn incentivise banks to lend to them. “Farmers play an important part in our lives. We need them for our survival,” said Shilpa Kamath (14), also of Bombay Cambridge. Teammate, Amit Mehta (16), a Class XI student of Fountainhead School, Surat, suggested a model where investors would be directly involved in research and development, and promoting crops that grow more efficiently: “This is a profit to the soil, to the famers, the investor, and overall, to the human race!”
The Jordanian children have been regulars at the conclave for some years now. They bring to the table problems born of their own experience, and the best part, Dr. Luthra says, is that they take the lessons from here and implement them back home.
Leyla Husein’s grandparents are Palestinian refugees settled in Jordan. Beela Said, from the American School in Jordan, told the group that children of refugees had their schooling disrupted, and though there are schools in the camps, some children are taught things they already know, others are taught at a higher level than they can cope with. Jordanian children, they said, take a proficiency test to assess their learning levels, and their idea is that children of refugees take that test (it is online, and some camps have computer centres). They want to create a manual of the test results which will help teachers in the camps to pick up from where a child left off when she was in her home country. This sort of structured teaching will also help normalise the child’s life, even in a refugee camp.
As Beela put it, “Why should refugee kids, because of their unfortunate circumstances, be deprived of a proper education and employment opportunities?”
Minds that are free
Mr. Ravindranath says, “In the past, I’ve got a chance to do this with people who lead multi-million dollar companies or political leaders. These students are doing better than any other group I’ve interacted with.” Instead of the defensive attitudes he’s used to — “Been there, done that”, “Won’t look at any other option”, “peripheral change only” — he says, the kids look at problems with an unbiased mind.
While the mentors were in awe of some of the ideas, they did impose discipline. Mr. Stalin, for instance, played the taskmaster. He told the kids they had to express their ideas in two minutes flat, after which he would ask them questions; if they couldn’t answer, they would have to go back to the drawing board. “They were psyched into doing all these things,” he says afterwards. “It was very productive. A lot of good leaders and innovators have come up.”
When Mr. Ravindranath asked the children what could be done differently at such an event, none of the children volunteered to speak. “Did anyone get bored, or disagree with the approach?” Still no reply. He pointed straight at one child. “Am sure you felt that way two or three times, dude!” he said, eliciting a blush and much laughter from the team.
Towards the end, selfies were taken, and a pair of children tested their strength against some cushions stacked up against the wall. They had fun, they learnt things, and went back into the world with ideas of change.
