Enabling Leadership

More than ever before, the world needs each of us to step up as role models,  problem solvers and global citizens. Instead of inspiring us, unfortunately today’s  “leaders” more often than not do not set an example for us.  We urgently need a new definition of leadership, one where "every child can be a leader". 

For children to succeed, they need to develop strong belief systems, excellent problem solving skills and a keen sense of awareness and responsibility. Skills like self-confidence, creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking become critical. Enabling Leadership believes that engaging and fun programs help children experience learnings first-hand at school, that as adults they will carry these forward to change the world.

In India, 113 million children (52%  of all students) are unable to afford quality education and a government school is their only lifeline. Most government schools, however, provide little opportunity to develop essential skills like problem solving, collaboration and communication, values, and principles. This critical gap in the foundation years, sets these children behind and leaves them unequipped to become productive and responsible citizens. An estimated 53% of Indian students are not on track to have the education and skills necessary for employment in 2030. India is home to 20% of the world youth population and this percentage is expected to rise until 2030 before it starts declining. So the magnitude of the problem is huge. 

Enabling Leadership makes holistic development possible by bringing experiential music, Lego and football programs to students in under-resourced government schools in Asia. Our creative programs are designed to enable children to have experiences and opportunities to learn leadership skills first-hand, learning to communicate and collaborate, work towards goals, innovate, co-create, compete and present their work - critical skills to making them ‘job and future ready’. 

Teachers/coaches are hired, trained intensively in curriculum and teaching methodologies, and deployed in government schools to work with students for a 6-year period from Grade 4-9. Each year consists of 48 synchronous sessions, asynchronous individual and group assignments (using video and messaging on mobile phones), and year-end showcase events.

Just for Kicks, enables students to carry their leadership learnings from the football field into real-life situations/challenges.

Music Basti’s group-based music learning program enables students to write, compose and perform songs at a public concert.  

Build Maya (Lego program), uses the principles of positive play and design thinking to help students build and innovate and solve real-life problems. 

We are currently working on a comprehensive platform to house our lesson plans and content, connect students/teachers/parents/donors and evaluate  student progress. 

Our solution serves children and adolescents in the 9-15 year age group, a highly impressionable and key foundational age bracket. Since our students come from families of daily wage earners or parents who have low-paid unskilled jobs, they are unable to afford a good education, and are thus enrolled in under-resourced public schools. In the rural areas, our students are from families that depend on agricultural labor or small local businesses.

Most students are first generation learners or children of parents who have few years of education. Due to lack of skills required to be gainfully employed, the population that our students come from have high rates of unemployment. Our students are at risk of falling prey to illegal activities, and early marriage and pregnancy rates are high. In our rural program in Karnataka, for example, studies show that about 40% of marriages and child births take place before girls turn 18.

Innovative experiential programs (using sports, music and Lego) like ours are unknown to the students we work with and could be game changing for them and their families. Impact studies show that our students have developed high levels of initiative and motivation to do well, self-awareness and empathy towards others, confidence to take calculated risks, ability to present their thoughts and thrive in situations of uncertainty. During Covid in 2020-21 when none of our students in India attended school due to school closures, our students showed all the above traits throughout our online engagement with them. 

Several of our alumni have joined us as teachers and coaches. In the rural areas we work in, a majority of our teachers and coaches are themselves from the schools where they are now teaching. Both these groups add precious perspective in program development and operations, and community connect. 

Enabling Leadership works with students in rural areas of India where they do not have access to quality education that prepares them for the future.   Inequity in education affects girls here disproportionately.

Our innovative programs use Music, Football and Lego as mediums to engage 9-15 year olds. Each program, while engaging and fun, is carefully designed to enable children to collaborate, reflect, and connect first-hand experiences/learnings from the classroom/playground with their real lives. Our curriculum, experiential pedagogy and the blended learning model using workshops and projects, teach students to become excellent problem-solvers, positive community contributors and global citizens. 

Enabling Leadership's programs have had different learning and growth trajectories. Just for Kicks, our football program, was started in 2011 with 110 students in Pune (India). Today it has grown to reach 4000 students across 6 cities and 2 rural sites in India, and 1 rural site in Cambodia (piloting in 2021). Started in 2013, Music Basti went from reaching a handful of students in 1 slum in New Delhi to 1300 students across 4 cities and 1 rural site in India. Build Maya (Lego) started in our rural site in 2017 with 25 students, is now in 3 sites and reaches 450 students.  

Our program, training and operations models and M&E framework/tools/rubrics have adapted to varying situations and evolved into mature replicable models. Student success and trust gained from the communities we work, give us the confidence to now grow both reach and impact.

For a child to become an employable and responsible adult, she must develop foundational literacy and numeracy, digital skills, essential life/leadership skills and vocational job-specific skills. This needs a holistic learning model, which while might be available in a few well-resourced urban schools, can be very challenging when trying to reach children who live in rural areas and attend under-resourced and poorly managed public schools. EL’s approach uses creative mediums like football, music, and Lego, innovative lesson plans and content that use fun games and workshops to combine teaching life skills, foundational skills and digital skills, projects that teach children to work in groups to solve community problems, exposure to career options in the fast growing sports, entertainment and design industries, an experiential learning pedagogy and the use of technology to “democratize” the education process bringing together many different vested parties both local and remote to support in the development of the child. Further, a blended learning model allows children to appreciate the value of guided practice. We maintain a 50:50 gender ratio in every batch and integrate concepts of gender equity in the curriculum. The content, methodology and model all together ensure a holistic learning environment that can be scaled very efficiently.

Reach in 2021-22:

5340 students (50% girls and 50% boys) across: 

- Urban India: Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune and Hyderabad

- Rural India: 18 villages in Dharwad district and 7 villages in Uttar Kannad district (both districts in Karnataka)

- Rural Cambodia: 4 villages in Battambang province

2021-222022-232023-242024-252025-26OUTREACHIndia Urban4,8608,80014,00020,00026,000India Rural1,0003,0006,00010,00018,000TOTAL INDIA5,86011,80020,00030,00044,000SEA1407002000500012000TOTAL REACH6,00012,50022,00035,00056,000

Reach Indicators:

# of students enrolled in our programs

% of boys and girls enrolled in our programs

% of enrolled boys and girls attending at least 75% sessions (we have not collected this data regularly)

% of enrolled boys and girls submitting home assignments virtually

% of enrolled boys and girls participating in Enabling Leadership events (league matches, music concerts and Lego showcases)

% of student homes visited by our teachers/coaches (physically or virtually) 

Impact Indicators:

% of enrolled boy and girl students improving their leadership assessment scores year on year. (Based on or Leadership Skills Framework, Leadership assessment score is a comprehensive score on the leadership skills displayed by students through the program duration) 

% of enrolled boy and girl students improving their technical skills and knowledge (in music, Lego construction design and football) year on year. (Technical assessment score, based on a rubric, is a comprehensive score on the technical skills and knowledge displayed by students through the program duration) 

% of surveyed boys and girls giving positive feedback on their leadership and technical learning outcomes

% partner schools giving positive feedback on program quality and effectiveness

# of students who take part in other activities/initiatives in their schools or communities

    

Currently, Enabling Leadership works in 6 cities (Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad) and 29 villages (25 in India, 4 in Cambodia) .

Total Staff Strength:153

Full-time staff:67

Part-time Staff:85

Consultants: 1

The Teachers and Coaches make a large proportion of our staff (115 out of 153). Most of them come either directly from the communities we serve or from similar backgrounds. In fact, 5 of them are alumni of our program.

Our Program development team and Program Managers have several years of education, life skills development, and curriculum develop experience. They are also experts in each of the mediums we use. Most of them have been with the organization from its inception.

The Leadership team consists of people with experience ranging from 10-30 years and from varying backgrounds - social development, corporate and academia.

The team has focused on building efficient and scalable processes, a robust organizational structure, and a people development model focused on building talent and culture.

The Leadership team at Enabling leadership has a diverse background - age groups, educational background and work experience, economic levels as well as gender.

We use a comprehensive Values and Culture handbook to develop the type of work environment that embodies the very same Leadership Framework that we want to instill in our children.

Enabling Leadership’s solution to solve the crisis in foundational skills for children and adolescents has been tried and tested over the past 10 years. While funding is the big barrier to our growth in terms of reach, especially in the Covid and post-Covid period, we are also working on becoming a data-driven organization.

Enabling Leadership’s mission to provide a million under-served children with the skills to thrive in an unknown future is a daunting task, which cannot be reached in isolation. We want to join the Solve community because:

• We are focused entirely on populations in restricted environments. This matches the ethos of Solve.
• As an organization, we aim to provide high quality programs with sustained outcomes. The Solve community could assist in improving and honing our current program.
• Scale is at the heart of our program. MIT Solve’s networks may help us with consolidating ourselves in Cambodia and further selecting and rolling out our programs in 3rd, 4th and 5th countries.

Enabling Leadership's work involves working on a much-needed but difficult to explain and justify problem - starting from convincing beneficiaries that these skills are essential to their future livelihoods to convincing donors that this effort is crucial to solving the world's education crisis. For this, we would like to get support on our messaging and marketing so that we can make clear the need and the urgency to our stakeholders.

With our goal of reaching 1 Million children in the next 10 years, we need to develop a highly efficient and scalable program delivery model that makes use of technology. For this, we need support to develop our technology Platform

Technology Companies that could support the ideating and development and roll-out of our technology Platform

Social investors who are ready to invest in our cause

marketing and Social media companies who can help develop our messaging and help implement a marketing strategy