Project DEFY Nooks

1. Modern education is not leading to economic and social equality. This is due to a critical mismatch between what education provides and what people need and want. 

2. Creation of self-learning spaces called ‘Nooks’, i.e.  physical spaces equipped with resources such as laptops, internet, tools, recycled materials and technology. Free-of-charge for everyone, Nooks enable community members to discover their interests and acquire practical skills. They engage in project-based learning of their own choice which addresses real-life issues in creative and innovative ways, helps them to create independent livelihoods and become their own job creators.

3. Through Nooks, communities caught in endless cycles of marginalization break their way out of it by creating skills and developing ideas in-tune with their personal needs, interests and aspirations. Instead of creating dependencies on others to solve their problems, it empowers communities to do it themselves.

While global access to education has drastically increased over the last decades, this has not translated into qualitative improvements of peoples' lives. Today's mainstream education systems cements issues of poverty and inequality rather than helps overcoming it. Most students coming from underprivileged communities are reliant on public sector schools for their education in which their learning experience is severely curtailed by overcrowded classrooms, frequent teacher absenteeism, high drop-out rates, poor infrastructure and physical and psychological abuse of students. Affordable private schools likewise are marred by unqualified teachers and rote learning for the test instead of nurturing critical and transferable thinking skills. Additionally, both public and private sector education distributes a pre-given, top-down and abstract kind of knowledge which is not catering to the real-life, individual circumstances of students from marginalised communities. As a result, the best they can usually hope for is to gain basic literacy and numeracy skills in order to find a more or less exploitaitve job at the lowest ranks of the economic ladder. By giving back education into the hands of local communities themselves, we enable marginalised members to design their own education and break out of the cycle of poverty. 

Self-designed learning is one of the most effective ways to enable marginalised community members acquiring skills and knowledge tailored to their own needs, interests, dreams and aspirations. We achieve this through the set-up of ‘Nooks', or 'schools without teachers' that provide everyone with free access to technology, tools, resources and information to design their own education. Our learners use the Nook and its resources for various purposes including finding ways of following their passion, solving a particular problem or issue affecting themselves and/or their families, enhancing their incomes and creating alternative livelihoods for themselves, as well as to address and solve local problems and issues in the broader community. Every Nook also has a minimum goal of 50 % female participation. As our Nooks help to shape a ‘Community of Learners’ rather than just empowering individual Learners, girls and women often take the lead in projects, which  improves gender equality and justice across the communities we work in. Through all this, Nooks address some important Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) such as SDG 4, SDG 5, and SDG 8. 

Our target group includes those individuals, families and communities who face severe social and economic marginalisation, either due to long established practices and conditions or due to recent occurrences. 

Marginalised communities which also includes refugees who encounter social stigmatization, racism, poverty, unemployment and exploitative labour, displaced people etc trying to break out of the cycle of poverty face many hurdles in the endeavor while actively creating their own future. A lack of resources, educational and skill-based opportunities and sharing platforms prevent the community members from realising their full potential and co-create meaningful, thriving lives with and alongside each other. Instead, it keeps the local population in a downward spiral of hopelessness and hardship.

In the countries and communities we work with, (India, Bangladesh, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Uganda) this often means to accept a job at the lowest levels of the ladder as a human, a life limited to taking care of the family (esp women), following the already pre-given path of what your parents do as kids. We are working with those people who no longer want to have their wings clipped but are ready to start flying - men engaged in hard labour who want to become artists; housewives mostly who develop an interest in technology-based solutions; children from ‘failing schools’ who start to create independent livelihoods built on their own interests, skills and talents.
Further, within this already marginalised community, it is girls and women who are the most marginalised and oppressed. As such most women are not allowed to work outside and to earn their own income, but are expected to stay within the confines of the family home. They do not have freedom to make their own decisions, especially also when it comes to further education as learning (and knowing) more than their husbands is discouraged. Therefore, literacy rate among women is also comparably low, as is their self-esteem and confidence in themselves. 
Consequently, it is no surprise that one of the major issues identified in these communities is the lack of both relevant education as well as after-school learning opportunities and the missing access to higher education.

With the set-up of a ‘Nook,’ or self-designed learning center, that caters to the needs and interests of the population we want to provide all community members with the opportunity to craft their own, individual life stories and transform community life for the better. 
With this focus, the local youth who may be most vulnerable, faced with complex choices and limited opportunities become our primary target where the nooks help them to understand the life ahead of them. It helps to develop the skills and knowledge they will need to navigate towards a healthy professional life and to become a strong community contributor. Rather than being permanently drilled to prepare for a future to come which they cannot control and in which they are only passive spectators, Nooks encourage Learners to become active creators and designers of their own lives

Also women, children and persons with disabilities, who usually face multiple layers of societal marginalisation are an extremely important focus from a long term perspective, ensuring they can develop their own identities in the context of the community. Nooks help to identify and pursue their own interests and passion and develop agency to voice out their own opinion to contribute to the families and the community. Nooks give children an access to education that is  relevant and satisfy their individual curiosities, interests and aspirations.
Beyond these, we look for people who may face special marginalisation relevant only to the specific context or to a recent occurrence such as the Covid Pandemic which has ultimately resulted in tremendous loss of livelihood impacting a large number of families in all rural and urban settlements. 

Nooks address the problem of limited access to relevant, localised and quality education for marginalised communities. Without increased access to this, communities will remain caught in endless cycles of poverty. The pivotal role of education is also reflected in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which strive to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and to promote lifelong learning opportunities for everyone (SDG 4). In contributing to achieve this essential goal, which acts as a catalyst and multiplier for other related goals, we therefore likewise contribute to reach other SDGs including SDGs 1,  3, 5, 8, 10 and 11.  

The last four years of Project DEFY, were aimed at establishing ourselves as an organisation and at nurturing a skilled and motivated team. Beyond this, our most important goal has been to set-up self-designed learning centres or ‘Nooks’ across marginalised communities in order to understand the learning centre’s effectiveness and their impact on the local community, and learn from these experiments. 2021 is the end of this Experimentation Stage. 

Our vision for the next two years is to make preparations for the next 100 Nooks, and study them over a period of five years. Developing the next 100 Nooks will help us understand and answer several new questions that were not possible in the earlier stage, and test the possibility of this model to scale within regions and over larger groups of people, in terms of operations, finance, partnerships and overall faith in and credibility of the model.

Project DEFY (‘Design Education for Yourself’) does not aim to ‘reform’ or ‘fix’ the existing education system like most other development organisations. Instead, we aim to re-imagine education.

Nooks are 'schools without teachers' that provide everyone with free access to technology, tools, resources and information to design their own education and access, co-create knowledge with each other. They are low-cost solution to provide equal access to knowledge and quality education and are free to use for everyone in the local community.
Nooks offer the Learners the opportunity to practice new skills, develop and apply their creativity and imagination and create real-life, hands on projects in the process. Where schools ‘produce’ ‘productive’ students with the same kind of memorised and standardised knowledge, Nooks help Learners to develop 21-st Century skills like digital literacy, critical thinking, creativity and entrepreneurship.

Nooks are not vocational training centres that provide a certain number of pre-decided skills to the Learners so they serve as cheap labour force according to market demands, but they are inclusive, safe spaces where we support each Learner or group of Learners to find what they really want to do in the here and now. Learners may come to us to work on hands-on projects such as tailoring or carpentry, build a drone, learn to make robots, solve a problem in the community, become a green entrepreneur etc. There is no curriculum, textbook or teacher involved which tells them what to do and no gatekeeper that limits the access to knowledge for them.

Current impact numbers 

Number of Direct beneficiaries - 6500+
Number of Indirect beneficiaries - 3000+
14 Nooks across 2 continents

Plan for next 1 year 
Along with running our existing nooks, here is our plan for the next 1 year.
Over the next 12 months we will be focussing on building the foundation for scale.
Partnerships: Build a robust partnership framework for a higher level of partnership such that we bring together partners to develop a group or collective (we call it a package) of Nooks. 
This would allow us to develop about 10 Nooks simultaneously as a single project.
Team:  Focus on recruitment under various specialist roles as well as growing a core team. 
L&D: Creation of a robust training plan for Nook Managers on the ground creating an integrated training process. While we have a training process currently in place this will be tested at the level of scale currently of the nooks.
Technology: Making the choice of the relevant technology across functions and especially in M&E process.
Sustainability Plans: Developing additional micro-programs that can be attached to the Nook operation and enable Nooks to reach their full potential and an almost independent existence.

Impact number in 5 years 
100 Nooks over 5  years across 3 continents
Number of Direct beneficiaries-  52000 unique constant learners
Number of Indirect beneficiaries- 156000 

As a ‘user-driven’ organisation that does not aim to directly empower people through staging targeted interventions in people’s lives but instead provides the space, resources, tools and exposure for people to empower themselves, our focus in measuring the impact we create is necessarily and logically learner-dependent and indeed learner-centric. As such, our impact metrics put a clear focus on measuring learner outcomes which all build on each other:

1.        Nook Learners get introduced to self-designed learning (SDL)
2.        Nook learners co-create an inclusive, safe space
3.        Nook Learners discover their own interests and passions
4.        Nook Learners achieve their own Learning Goals
5.        Learning Goals are context-driven
6.        Nook Learners acquire new skills and knowledge

Long-term impact factors include the number of (for-profit) SMEs started by learners; the number of for-profit and non-pofit initiatives benefitting the local community, individual people and/or the planet, started by or with Nook learners; the increase in income for learners; employment statistics (quantitative and qualitative) of previous Nook Learners; opportunties for further education accessed by learners after leaving the Nook; new perspectives gained by and overall outlook on life for Nook learners; etc.

We have 6 full time employees in the team and there are several other individuals who are involved in the respective Nooks on the ground. We also have a team of volunteers who are engaged with us. 

We have 3 advisors who provide us with guidance on our growth out of which 1 advisor spend 2 hours a week guiding us on key growth metrics.

We have always believed in structuring ourselves as a lean team, where intelligent design can ensure that each individual has a tremendous impact. Currently, we are structured in a way that each Project or Program has a leader. The leader creates a team from the existing DEFY staff members, based on their interests, skills and availability. 

We currently have several roles, such as head of Indian operations, director for international projects, chief of impact, chief of growth, hoppers and nook managers and fellows. Additionally, the team is supported by a Communications team and an Accountant. When we look at the next 100 Nooks and think about creating parallel Nooks some new roles are bound to take shape.

Leadership team:

Abhijit Sinha, Co Founder, CEO:   Abhijit brings with himself the program design experience and is the creator of the concept of ‘Nook’. Abhijit has created low cost innovations in the past like a $500 ambulance in Uganda, a $25 water-less urinal, an app for detecting car-accidents and more. 

Megha Bhagat, Co Founder, CGO:   Megha brings with herself her previous sector experience of having set up and grown programs as well as organisation operations. 

Arvind Badrinarayanan, Non Executive Director: Arvind after experiencing nearly every major educational system first hand, Indian, Arab, British and American, in primary, high school and college, he came to the conclusion that the system was broken globally. He keeps the team honest by building in checks and balances.

Among all the nooks Project DEFY has setup across 4 countries, 60% of them are led by women. The 3 nooks outside India are headquartered in their respective countries with the team from India supporting them to establish and grow. 

The Core team in Bangalore, India, have employees from all around the world like Germany, Zimbabwe, US and from various states in India like Manipur, Kerala, Delhi, Punjab, Karnataka, Tamil nadu, Meghalaya, Gujarath, Madhya Pradesh and Bengal.  Our nooks welcome learners of all age groups, gender, economic and social backgrounds where all learners are equally exposed to a range of skills in technology, art, science and community projects. However, the majprity of learners in all our nooks have been women and children.We have had old women making battery operated toys, house-wives enjoying carpentry projects and little girls learning to program the arduinos. 

We have also had facilitators and volunteers from diverse backgrounds conducting workshops and mentorship programs in art, photography electronics, poetry, carpentry, story telling, organic gardening, tailoring etc. On community days, which is the event day when all the learnrs present their projects, it is witnessed by their community which includes their families, nrighbours, friends, village heads, mentors, entrepreneurs and investors.

A crucial part of Project DEFY’s track record is the principle to enter a market only together with a partner organisation that knows the realities on the ground and can help us to quickly gain foothold in as well as expand across any new locality. We are looking for partners that aim to overcome societal barriers with the help of technology and innovation and who believe that people have the capacity to help themselves, if given adequate space, opportunities and resources to do so. As such, MIT Solve seems to be the ideal partner to help realising our vision of bringing the self-designed education revolution into the world. We further trust that your organisation can help us overcoming the following specific barriers: 

Initial funding 
-Connecting with relevant organisations to expand the Nook model
-Creating media exposure, speaking opportunities etc. to promote the self-designed learning model
-a movement of ‘getting rid of rigid degree requirements’ for job applications and instead relying on learning portfolios, practical skills and real-life experiences. This will help to start changing the mindset of general population regarding the value of schooling and obtaining (i.e. paying for) a degree vs obtaining practical, concrete skills and engaging in real-life projects, thus creating more broad acceptance for the idea of self-designed learning
-Identifying local talents that will be employed in key roles in nook locations 
-Mentors in legal and compliance
-Connecting to relevant policy actors 

Our vision for the next two years is to make preparations for setting up next 100 Nooks, and study them over a period of five years. These seven years put together shall be called Stage 1 Scale. Developing the next 100 Nooks will help us understand and answer several new questions that were not possible in the earlier stage, and test the possibility of this model to scale within regions and over larger groups of people, in terms of operations, finance, partnerships and overall faith in and credibility of the model.

The team at DEFY will need to evolve and learn the new skills for the scale up. Our current roles include head of Indian operations, director for international projects, chief of impact, chief of growth, hoppers and nook managers and fellows. Additionally, the team is supported by a Communications team and an Accountant. When we look at the next 100 Nooks and think about creating parallel Nooks some new roles are bound to take shape.

Many positions, such as impact and fundraising associates or Group Assessors, add to our existing departments and will help with better setup and management of the projects, while other completely new positions such as Trainers, Mentors and Guides can directly support the outcomes of the Nook and the Learners. We are, at the moment, discussing how and when such additions must happen. We do not envision such hirings for early 2021. Instead we are likely to organise such a team expansion over a total 3 year period (until Mar 2024).

Over the next few years, we hope bring together partners to develop a group or collective of Nooks. This would allow us to develop about 10 Nooks simultaneously as a single project, achieving the requisite parallelism.

Hence, for all these tasks and processes which revolve around basic scaling strategy, we need assistance.

1. The Radical Educators : These are our primary partners who truly believe in and share our vision, and create Nooks, Nook hubs or Nook Networks with us. We already have several such organisations who are our partners, such as Kshamtalaya Foundation (India), Dream Village (Rwanda), SINA LNA (Uganda), SwiZimAid and FFM (Zimbabwe), Barishal Youth Society (Bangladesh) and more. However, to achieve our next level our scale, we shall be seeking many more new partners within these geographies, and some beyond as well. 

2. The Enablers : Enablers are usually foundations or corporations that support Nooks through their five-year journey to self-sustenance. They are also many times early believers willing to invest in new ideas and collaborate with us in this challenging revolution. Like our educator partners, we have been fortunate to have several enablers who have helped us reach where we are, investing in one nook at a time. We now must make larger collaborations with organisations that have the capacity to invest proportionately to our scaling ambitions. Institutional partners such as the UN and its bodies, national governments and large foundations will be important to truly take this movement to the next level. However, we do not want to ignore smaller organisations, and wish to have greater numbers of smaller and more flexible partners join us as well.  

3. The Extended Network : The Nooks, Nook Networks and the Learners can be supported in many different ways. Especially in the case of learners, we hope to build new partnerships that help them take their ideas to the next level through seed grants, mentorships, internships or even to find passionate work-places for them to show their skill. This is a new area for us that we have only now begun focussing on. 4. The Mentors : As of this moment, this is the strongest felt need of the organisation. What we are attempting to do now, in scaling up our Nooks globally, requires tremendous guidance, mentorship and support, from individuals and organisations that have more experience than we do in building large ideas. We also look at mentors for making introductions with potential partners in the previous three categories, as well as to be critical questioners of our ideas and decisions. We hope that through MIT Solve, we may be able to meet several such people, some of whom may join us and help us in many years to come.

One of the first fledgling nooks that we created was in the nakivale refugee camp in Uganda. While it was a very early stage experiment, it already showed tremendous promise in enabling refugees to create their own opportunities and not wait for charity to change their life. 

We are going back again to work with more refugee communities in Uganda and Zimbabwe, to create Nooks together with them, not just for refugees, but also simultaneously for local citizens. We strongly believe that true inclusion and integration cannot happen in isolation. Time and again, we have seen people of various backgrounds, opposing opinions and ideologies and varied contexts being able to find a common ground in their co-dependency at the nook. At nooks people realise that each one can offer a lot, and people aren't ultimately so different. It takes help from many to move ahead in life, and true success cannot coincide with community failure. 

The nook in Uganda will soon be operationalized (it awaits remaining 40% funding) and the refugees staying in Nsambya, Kampala will soon be co-creating their learning and opportunities with Ugandan citizens. 
We hope the same will happen soon in Zimbabwe by 2022, where discussions have only now begun.

Unlike schools, the learners at our nooks are free to pursue their learning by choosing a topic of their interest and working on a project associated with that topic. The nooks which are predominantly setup in marginalised communities, provide access to hands on learning experiences for all. The nook, with all its tools, resources and learning methods makes "Equitable classrooms" accessible for all, and provides an option for learning various aspects of STEM education while they work on their interests and life goals. 

The learners at the nook build projects by learning through internet and working on projects using the various materials and machinery. Through these methods, nook learners have acquired various skills like welding, plumbing, electronics, carpentry, tailoring, arts and handicrafts, painting, graphic design, photography and film, web design, basics of computer and software, freelancing, marketing, communication, English language etc which are considered as high-demand skills in the community. 

Hence the nooks, 
- In the short term provide access to quality education based on the community’s needs, with a focus on acquiring practical skills through self-designed learning 
- Nook provides a safe and inclusive space that brings the community (children, youth, adults and elders; boys and girls; men and women; people from diverse social backgrounds and professions) closer together
- In the medium-term: Nook develops into a common space for the community to interact with each other, talk about their problems collectively and solve their problems collectively
- Providing the space, platform and resources to the local community where they can harness, set free, improve and showcase their skills, talents, ideas and creativity
- Nook provides Learners with concrete hard and soft skills in order to help them increase income and craft their own, more independent livelihoods (see list of skills below)
- Providing digital access as well as marketing and business skills and market linkages to grow community members’ existing micro-businesses and/or start new ones
- Reviving traditional arts and crafts traditions and adding new innovations to it
- Strengthening the economic resilience of local residents by providing Learners with the skill of ‘Learning how to Learn’ rather than being dependent on what others teach them (or don’t teach them) 
- Providing women access to knowledge and help them find and build their own identity outside their role as housewives and family caretakers
- Developing the Nook into a local hub for low-cost, community-based innovations on more sustainable living
- In the long-term: transforming Refugees Colony into a place known for the innovation capacity, creativity and craftsmanship of its local residents

We think we fit this criterion. However, we must disclaim that we do not have any "women-only" program, nor do we have programs that push technology solutions to women. For us, women are the most important target audience, since in most communities we work in, women are doubly marginalized. We do not create women-only programs for the sake of men; so they may see, understand and respect women as equal contributors to solutions, technology and society at large. Women and men (also girls and boys) work together at nooks, supporting each other to achieve their dreams. Since, women are doubly disadvantaged in the communities, the impact and delta change is greater for our female learners. Besides learning how to use Internet and various technologies, they also begin creating them on equal footing as men. Through our outreach we focus on inviting women first to the Nook and try to ensure 50-60% participation of women and girls at the nook. The impact of their success, of course, goes beyond the learners and spills out to their families and communities, changing their perspective towards their own daughters, wives, sisters and mothers, and women in general. We make sure to create public platforms for women to show their projects, and thus their capabilities and to speak their mind and share their dreams loud enough for all to hear, and sometimes be shocked by

Our learning centres, nooks, are not technological solution, but a community solution. They are powered by people, with the assistance of technology. 

We believe we qualify for this prize since Nooks have already evidenced the creation of digital inclusion in marginalized communities. Where communities previously did not have access to internet or computers, are today designing applications and products using tech tools and putting themselves on the digital scale, and balancing out the imbalance in technology creation otherwise limited to the western and affluent world. 

Nooks are, by design, equitable classrooms where individuals, no matter their background, are able to build their own individual and collective dreams. Since the goals and learning outcomes are decided by learners, they are in complete control of their learning and collectively in control of their learning space as well. 

We do not favour the term "classrooms" for the colonial baggage it carries and it's rather lengthy history of substituting human curiosity and natural creativity for dullness, blind obedience and unquestioning following of authority. We are not such classrooms and would like to promote ourselves for the prize only if an expansion of definition of a classroom, school or learning environment is possible.