Aarambh

Watch-Call-Recharge

The Sustainable Development Goal 2 (Zero Hunger) sets a target of ending all forms of malnutrition by 2030.Globally 795 million people are undernourished and 3 in 10 stunted children are Indian.Malnutrition has been a central issue in India for many decades now.The government is working to tackle malnutrition through various programmes and policies. Integrated Child Development Services(ICDS), the main flagship programme was started way back in 1975 with the sole objective of improving the nutritional status of women and children in India. ICDS has reached the masses with more than a million Anganwadi(pre-school) centers but has failed to bring down the number of malnourished children substantially in India especially in the tribal areas. Clearly the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4) shows that the ICDS scheme is far behind in attaining its objectives and furthermore the SDG2. There are many reasons for its failure. The major ones being infrastructure issues, corruption and lack of trained human resources at the field level. Any programme is as good as the human resource implementing it. 
Services of the ICDS programme are delivered by the Anganwadi worker (AWW) and a helper. However, training of the AWW is a big issue in ICDS. Lack of flexibility, incentives to undergo the training and refresher sessions has been in a bottleneck in the present ICDS training system.Current training methodology is completely classroom based and the AWW’s have to travel to the district place to attend the training.Timely and frequent access to information is one of the major problems we are committed to address.

Our solution has three major parts,

1.Access to low digital footprint video 

2.Evaluation over a phone call 

3.Mobile recharge as an incentive. 

We have developed 40 low digital footprint video modules which can be loaded on a simple phone with a memory card.A set of question and answers are attached at the end of every video.The Anganwadi Worker has to watch one video per week and then call us where we ask her the same set of questions.The AWW get her mobile recharged as an incentive if she answers all questions.
The proposed training methodology was initially carried out on a pilot basis with 30 AWWs in the tribal region of Peth in the state of Maharashtra. Owing to a good response and the willingness of the AWW to such kind of training we have now scaled up the operations to more than 500 AWW across three states in India.This initiative is bootstrapped at IIT Bombay and is supported by three district administrations.
Front-line health workers are the real and unsung heroines of the world.They are the ones who actually are bringing a change into many lives and thus the world,we are just helping them do that.
Nelson Mandela once said “History will judge us by the difference we make in everyday lives of our children”

Our solution can be deployed in a low resource setting in which the front-line health workers work, without interfering with their routine or forcing them to buy additional resources. There are 2 parts of the innovation:

1. Use of offline, low digital footprint videos which would be uploaded on a feature phone through the memory card
2. Providing mobile talk time as an incentive after a successful oral evaluation, thought being quite less in financial terms, but psychologically is an important part of their household budget

We would say that not technology but appropriate technology is an integral of our solution. We do not claim to have invented any new technology, but took the available Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)  and built an innovative process around it. Our process involves use of latest multimedia technology optimized for a feature phone.The oral evaluations calls will be recorded and stored in cloud for future analysis. Our team believes in  the philosophy that “Technology is necessary but not the sufficient condition to solve socio-economic development problems”

1. Evaluate effectiveness by deployment on a large scale
2. Fine tune the solution as per the field experiences
3. Scale up the deployment into multiples districts of Maharashtra,India
4. Identify qualitative indicators to assess the impact of the program
5. Compare the inter-district project effectiveness 

Our vision is Aarambh being integrated into the state training policy and every front-line health worker following our watch-call-recharge method for refresher training.

We approach the district administrator through which the front line health workers participate in our program.Since our training is a year long, we sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the district administration and will introduce new refresher training video modules every year which would be loaded in the phones of the front-line workers and  keep them engaged with our solution.

Front-line health workers known as Anganwadi workers(AWW) in India are responsible for operating an Anganwadi(preschool) which aims to improve the nutritional status of  children in the village.We are currently serving around 500 of these front-line health workers(AWW) through our project representatives, present on the field to facilitate them.Now along with their own training,the Anganwadi workers are using these videos for advocacy and counselling to the pregnant mothers,adolescents girls and their families.

• We expect to serve the total AWW population (1,08,010) of Maharashtra which accounts to 8% of the total operational AWWs in India in the next 3 years.In the first year our target is to cover the 3 rural remote districts namely Palghar,Nashik,Yavatmal which accounts to approximately 30% of our 3 year target population
• We plan to gradually scale up the call centre infrastructure and recruit new field worker for facilitating the project.Set up regional centres for project monitoring.

Both co-founders are graduates of the Technology and Development program at Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.The program teaches how technology plays a role in socio-economic development.The biggest asset of the team is that, all are made familiar to the context of the problem.The entire team works on the field with the stakeholders and identifies the actual problem rather than a pseudo macro problem. We have a designer, human computer interaction specialist,nutrition PhD student,human development specialist, sociologist on board.The team works under the guidance of a retired bureaucrat (current Head of CTARA and Centre for Policy Studies at IIT Bombay)

• We got our initial revenue for piloting from the district administration.We charge the district for the training of an entire year.Our human resources are partly covered through small philanthropic funds available with us
• We are also exploring the crowdfunding option where we could raise money at least for the mobile recharge incentives.We would need help from the Solve community to build and implement this crowdfunding revenue model.

Solve will provide us the keys to a talented and more importantly committed network of members working to solve important problems of the world.We value people more than anything.We would love to have some experienced people on board to help scale our operations.and who does not like funding..?? :) ,financial help to support our human resource will be awesome.As mentioned earlier we want to get the incentive part of our expenditure through crowdfunding platform.We hope to utilize the solve platform to get mentorship to implement it.

Two major key barriers we see are :

1.Scaling operations

2.Crowdfunding incentives expenditure

3.Assessing and then communicating our impact with the world

Solve can help in following ways :

1.Connecting to global expertise in the field of social innovation and entrepreneurship  

2.Connection to experienced people who have successfully raised funds through crowdfunding channel

3.Funds for the operations