Mentor To Go

Mentor To Go provides disadvantaged adolescents with access to trained mentors through a proven set of mobile technologies. Matched by an algorithm, mentors and youth overcome geographic and social barriers to embark on a journey that provides them with the skills they need to reach their full potential.

In a rapidly changing labour market, young people whose schools, parents and communities are ill-equipped to provide them 21st century skills, role models and diverse opportunities, find themselves left behind. Despite advancements in reducing poverty, India historically has fared poorly in the field of social mobility. Studies find substantial intergenerational persistence, particularly in the case of low-skilled and low-paying occupations (Motiram and Singh, 2012). Through mobile technology we can provide young people transformative relationships with successful, resourceful mentors who can break information asymmetry, attitudinal and belief barriers, to help young people achieve greater upward mobility.

Increasingly, researchers attribute success in school and employment not to IQ or the acquisition of specific knowledge, but to young people’s character: their ability to persevere, find motivation, and respond to challenges (JPAL, 2013)

Mentoring relationships have proven pathways in furthering the development of such skills - especially emotional and social skills, critical thinking and reasoning skills, and positive identity (Rhodes et al 2007)

Our solution is already delivering results for young people. Our mentees drawn from rural and peri-urban locations in India, have completed several months of mentorship and early research indicates promising changes in self-confidence, knowledge and emotional resilience.

Adolescents aged between 14 and 21 from rural and peri-urban areas in India will benefit most from our solution. Recruited to join the programme through a network of community partners, they will access the solution through the basic mobile phones that are widespread in their communities. Through weekly calls, text messages and an interactive voice line, mentees will engage with mentors in a 10-month journey that helps them build emotional management & social skills, manage peer and family relationships, and make academic and career choices. Further iterations of the program will involve a mentee app for older youth.

5,000 young people recruited through our field partners. 5,000 mentors recruited and trained through social media and our online training process. 5,000 pairs matched using our algorithm - 5,000 young people are matched with mentors

All activities completed as tracked by the android application used by mentors - 4,000 young people complete our skills-based mentoring curriculum

Psychometric surveys pre and post intervention, session feedback reported via Interactive Voice Response (IVR) surveys - 3,000 young people report improved skills, beliefs, and increased confidence in their ability to successfully transition to work

Virtually every aspect of human development is fundamentally shaped by interpersonal relationships, like the kind facilitated by traditional in-person mentoring. However traditional mentoring is hard to scale; in size because of the time and logistics involved, and in geography because of fewer mentors beyond urban centers. We use technology to uniquely match mentors and mentees in a way that the core principles of dyadic relationships: trust, empathy and mutuality are maintained, while enabling networks and sharing of information at a national scale. To our knowledge, no similar national network of mentors and mentees connected by mobile technology exists.

Mentor To Go evolved from a series of human-centred design workshops that were conducted with mentors and mentees enrolled in our existing face-to-face programme. Building on the human insights we gathered in that process, the resulting solution facilitates connections between people who have never met, even with vastly different experiences and levels of access to technology. We collect information from mentors and mentees to match our pairs, recognising there is no one-size-fits-all model for mentorship. Rather than replacing a human solution with a technological one, we use technology as a bridge between people to help them both achieve their potential.

Mentees are recruited through community partners. Our community mobilisers engage with the parents of youth who don’t own their own phones, to ensure that families understand the program (especially safety and confidentiality), and consent to giving access to their phone, for at least 1 hour every week. For mentors, the curriculum, sms and calling technology is accessed via an Android app. The mentorship program is completely free for mentees to access and use. Mentors incur a calling cost of about 2.5 dollars per month on calls, which is affordable for their demographic (middle to upper income families)

There are three types of costs involved in our program:

1. Technology development costs - Development of the app, call routing and IVR system, and data dashboards. We received in-kind support from the Praekelt Foundation over 2016 and early 2017 to build a minimum viable working product. Subsequent development to support a program size of 5000 pairs is to be fundraised for. Our estimated costs of such development would be about Rs.800 per pair.

2. Operational costs - Program manager costs, curriculum and trainings for mentees and mentors (online for mentors), overhead costs. At current volume of 250 pairs, our fundraised budget for these amount to Rs.15000 per pair. At scale, with 5000 pairs, and use of technology to manage a few onboarding and pair management steps, the cost is estimated to be Rs.7500 per pair.

3. Mentorship costs - Call, sms & data costs: These will be borne by mentors

1. Running an effect mass-media campaign to attract a large pool of skilled volunteer mentors

2. Building technology enabled processes that can allow for onboarding and training of mentors - currently this still requires a large human effort. Reducing this would be key to reducing operational costs as well

3. Ensuring support from parents to allow youth who don’t own their own phones to access phones every week

4. Ensuring strong connects between mentors and mentees via the right need assessment and matching

5. Curating a diverse mentoring network that can provide varied opportunities, information and resources to pairs

https://www.facebook.com/mentortogo/

https://medium.com/@m2g/a-journey-with-my-mentee-advocate-suchitra-katkar-e651b2d43902

In starting Mentor To Go, our first question was if technology could be used to mediate experiences that fundamentally require the formation of a human bond between people. And further, can it build instrumental relationships - provide access to a range of information, opportunities and resources that lead to superior decision-making, well-being and quality of life. These questions open up vast fields of inquiry and experimentation. Our goal in applying to Solve is to learn from the many different ways people are solving similar problems, to share from our own experimentation and to build on the early successes we’ve seen.

Praekelt.Org designed, built and managed technology from 2016 to May 2017

The program uses technology from a few partners like LearnDash (for mentor training) and OnionDev (for call routing, IVR and sms)

We raised operational cost funding from the Rosy Blue Foundation and Amdocs India.

Mara Mentor in Africa, MentorMe in the USA, Maya Apa from Bangladesh and Mogul, a global brand