MakerGhat: Nurturing Youth Leadership through Making

With 180 million youth all set to enter India’s workforce in the next 15 years, of which over 50% from marginalized backgrounds, 90 million new jobs will have to be created, many requiring digital/technological competency. Yet over 54% of Indian youth today are not employable for any job, and 37% with a college degree are unemployed. India will be facing a major job crisis soon.

MakerGhat wants to make 5 million youngsters from underserved communities workforce ready to bridge this gap, by improving access and understanding of Maker Education through low cost tinkering tools and technology

MakerGhat builds low-cost makerspaces in schools and communities, accompanied by evidence-based curriculum, easily available materials and robust teacher training. Our programs develop key skills and attitudes linked to employability through hands-on training.

Youth between 12 to 18 years spend at least 1.5 hours a week on our maker program to develop fundamental 21st-century skills linked to employability: critical thinking, problem-solving, self-efficacy, and communication and collaboration. Through our learning platform, which is being tested this year, we will also be able to reach a larger number of classrooms & communities, and ensure teacher support through regular assessments and feedback collection.

More broadly, our goal is to build the next generation of leaders and entrepreneurs who come from diverse backgrounds and enable social and economic change for their communities.

MakerGhat aims to take hands-on maker and tinkering education to students between the ages of 12 to 16. Through our program, we try to build skills among students that they may not have access to otherwise, through their regular school curriculum - critical thinking, problem-solving, self-efficacy, communication & collaboration. 

At MakerGhat, we firmly believe that the best people to address challenges for communities are those from these communities. Unfortunately, historical inequalities have made it challenging for underserved communities to be heard and obtain the resources they need for societal change. The target group MakerGhat reaches out to have lower socio-economic access, and therefore lack opportunities to build on inter & intra-personal skills or explore innovation through science & tech. To address this, we create safe and open community spaces equipped with resources and mentors. Our goal is to facilitate social and economic change at the hyperlocal level by supporting the creation of community leaders, and build individuals who are ready for a future workforce that is driven by a community-first approach to development.

Over time, we will evolve into an incubator for projects, enabling youth to launch social and commercial enterprises that empower their communities.

Below are some sample videos made by teachers of the kinds of activities they have engaged in:

Teacher-made video on basic electronics
Students in Tamil Nadu building a Bug Bot

The leadership team of MakerGhat has several years of experience in working with underserved communities. Much of our team has lived experience with the issues we tackle—we have educators, people who went to government schools or small local colleges, and makers and entrepreneurs. Our team is religiously and socially diverse, representing the regions and communities we serve. Additionally, the founders have academic credentials which accelerate the understanding of these communities' needs. Aditya Vishwanath has a PhD in the Learning Sciences and Technology Design from Stanford, and Azra Ismail has a PhD in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech with a focus on gender equity and dignity of labor in the Global South. 

We currently focus on 6 states in India, and our team has Program Managers and Project Coordinators from those regions who help ensure teacher training, observation sessions, impact assessment, and the overall successful implementation of the program locally. These managers and coordinators are closely accountable to the Partnerships Lead, who is responsible for identifying and building government partnerships to reach underserved schools effectively. 

Our Curriculum team has experienced curriculum designers who have a real-time functioning vision of what will be required for students, specifically in line with their sociocultural and economic contexts. As diverse as India is, so are each of these states, and the curriculum is reworked to meet this kind of diversity. 

Our Monitoring & Evaluation system ensures that the health of the program remains consistent and the impact it is creating follows evidence-based structures. This also helps us gather input and feedback from the teachers and students. 

Feedback is almost always gathered in person, through our M&E mechanisms, and real-time via our WhatsApp groups. Teachers are encouraged to be vocal and their constraints accommodated in the most effective way possible. 

Using Learning Platforms and a more robust use of WhatsApp, potentially through a chatbot, will help us utilise technology as a tool, to further collect not just teacher feedback but also student feedback directly. It will also help us build a network of Maker alumni, who can continue supporting new makers from their community and interact with each other to support collective growth and innovation. Using these platforms to make them more teacher and student-facing is being tested this academic year.

MIT Solve is a unique opportunity for a small team like MakerGhat trying to make a big difference in the Indian education set-up. While funding is key for a program like ours which is looking to scale and reach more and more students, what is more essential is the network and visibility this provides us.

Solve will help us access some of the leading minds in maker education and social development through advisory teams as well as peer teams. This will help us receive critical feedback and constructive perspectives on making the program more effective at the grass roots.

Additionally, being able to taker our maker program to various platforms, discuss and present it, will also give us the global credibility we are looking to build - especially keeping in mind that we run largely on donations, grants, and CSR and require as many people as possible supporting our program. 

Maker Education in India remains to be explored effectively from the perspective of community development and equitable access to building an innovation mindset. At Maker Ghat, we are trying to use a low-cost, minimum-resource model to reach over 300,000 students in India. We are a small team that builds strong partnerships, curriculum, and teacher training methods, to ensure that program implementation is healthy and impactful. Our curriculum is 100% activity based and helps children explore their curiosity around science, tech, and innovation. 

In the past 4 years, we have not just worked with government partners to expand our reach, but have also worked with peer organizations to reach communities and classrooms that would otherwise not have access to maker opportunities. 

It is, in essence, a culmination of this multi-layered operational approach, that potentially sets us apart from some of the other organizations in the space in India. Affordable low-cost materials allows us to impact hundreds of students. Additionally, there is high accountability that comes from our associations with government bodies and other organizations. Along with keeping socio-economic diversity in mind, our approach helps us truly create makers who are able to already visualise useful innovations for their community. 

And of course, this can change the market completely. Not only can it start looking at entrepreneurship and innovation among youth from the aspect of social diversity and inclusion, but can also encourage peer organizations to work together. This will automatically drive change towards a singular goal - how do we make the future space for innovation an equitable ground for social development? And we hope that the answer to that would be an effective and intersectional reach of tinkering and maker learning. 

MakerGhat wants to reach 2 million students from underserved communities across India, by 2024!

• At the growth stage of our work, we are confident that this will be possible, as long as we keep making our curriculum relevant and hands-on. Through effective government partnerships, we have cracked the equation to a sustainable way of reaching students through government and government funded schools
• We want to also start slowly, but surely, realising our goals of becoming an incubator that can support truly unique and hyper-local innovations. While we may not be able to do this right away, we are already beginning to discuss the potential of grants to students/student teams who have come up with community-driven solutions through our program
• We also want to start making our maker community accessible and sustainable! Through maker clubs and student mentors, we are looking forward to a team of maker 'graduates' who are able to guide new maker students and also have the opportunity to voice their feedback, concerns, and opinions - which can be seriously adapted into our maker modules and educational approaches
• And finally, we would like to make our technology use as effective as possible. Through learning platforms like EdApp and using the various features of WhatsApp, we can quite easily make communication transperant, collective, and a mechanism for support for teachers and students. We are exploring LMS platforms and WhatsApp community options this year to understand how we can better these channels for the benefit of our teachers and students

In five years, MakerGhat would like to reach 5 million students and make them leaders and individuals who are ready for the workforce from a social development perspective!

• We want to have successfully reached our goal of becoming an incubator space which is encouraging and hand-holding community-driven innovations from underserved students to become usable viable products
• We want to have built a robust Alumni network of students who are not just entrepreneurs themselves after the program, but are also supporting other students to explore innovation and entrepreneurship through their network, experience, and maker education
• We want to have effectively created Learning Platforms that are easily accessible to both community centres as well as schools, which can encourage a DIY model of maker education, while not impacting the quality of implementation. As an open source organisation, we want ambassadors of maker education to be able to adopt our modules in the best way possible for those who need it, and know that they will get all the support they need from MakerGhat and its highly specialised team to do so.

Some indicators that we use to collect data and gauge whether or not our program is effective are: 

1. How easy do students find learning Science during and after our program?

2. Do students seem to have learnt something useful for their homes, communities, and schools during and after the program?

3. How equitable and democratic has the program made the classroom in terms of inclusion and collective work?

4. How many students in the classroom are thinking critically and asking relevant questions during and after the program?

5. How many students are replicating their knowledge after school, with their peers and at home?

Our Theory of Change is based on four key inputs that we provide as an organization towards the implementation of this program:

1. Maker Kits: Portable and cost-effective kits which help students tinker and build in a space familiar to them (their school campus) and with materials that are largely everyday and accessible 

2. Teacher Training: Hands-on training provided every 6 months to teachers who will support us in implementing these activities in the classroom, through effective strategies of collaboration, communication, and critical thinking 

3. Curriculum: Curated curriculum from MakerGhat, backed by research and relevant to cultural contexts and asks - built to support students in independent learning and development, as well as to encourage them to address community-specific challenges in the long run 

4. Monitoring & Evaluation: Weekly embedded assessments to understand impact and health of the programme, along with integrated baseline and endline reviews for a data-driven perspective on the effectiveness of the modules

There are essentially two modes of technology that we use both as  communication channels as well as implementational tools. 

1. WhatsApp is one of our primary channels for communication, implementation, and feedback collection. Through the app we create groups based on regions and/or collaborations, and provide modules and ativities to teachers on a weekly basis, including assessments that need to be filled in. This helps us coordinate with the teachers regularly, providing them with bite-sized information each week, instead of overwhelming them with the full module all at once. This also helps us ensure that modules are implemented within the framework and timelines planned for it. The channel also allows us to garner real time feedback from teachers every week and address any concerns sooner than later. 

2. EdApp is a Learning Management System (LMS) which we have started using this year, specifically with regards to one of our larger government collaborations - Atal Tinkering Labs (ATLs) across 8,700 schools in India, via the NITI Ayog scheme. The LMS allows our tinkering module to be available and easily accessible to teachers and students with basic infrastructure in their schools (Projector & Screen), to practice and explore tinkering.
While the tinkering module was built specifically in line with ATLs requirements, our core module can also be uploaded on this platform to reach out to more students in the country.We are currently working towards this and trying to make the platform more teacher-facing, helping them complete assessments and send in feedback automatically through the platform. This will also help us record teacher feedback in an effective way and implement chnages without missing out on any information!

As a team at MakerGhat we are extremely passionate and aware about being inclusive and diverse. As we expand as a team, not only are we keen to employ individuals from a cross section of socio-economic, gender, and religious backgrounds, but are also dependent on their perspectives to help make our maker program more relevant in the Indian context. 

Our Leadership Team includes Azra Ismail and Aditya Vishwanath. Azra is featured in the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics List and is recognised among the 75 Indian Women in STEAM by the Government of India and the British High Commission in India. She has completed her PhD with Georgia Tech in human-centred computing, focussing on AI for social good. 

Our 14 member team in MakerGhat has 5 women - all exceptional leaders in their own fields of work. Team members also come from an intersection of underserved economic and social backgrounds. We are looking to make this team more representative of voices, by hiring with an intent to be diverse. Additionally, we also ensure that compensation is based on skill, knowledge, interest, and experience - whether or formal or otherwise. 

In the work that we do, we make sure that we identify and reach underserved communities to the best of our abilities. To do this, we work with government departments which take us to some of the more underprivileged schools in the country, as well as with peer organisations who help us reach community centres where we are able to provide this program from a grassroots perspective. 

MakerGhat is a non-profit company, registered as a section 8 in India and 501c3 in the US. About 90% of our work is done via grants, donations, and CSR, while part of our work is financially supported by government entities and independent organizations we collaborate with. 

We typically request that our partner government or independent organizations cover some part of the expenses to reduce the financial burden on MakerGhat, based on the scale of the institution, how they are positioned, and other relevant factors. This sometimes includes covering teacher training costs (including the travel & accommodation of teachers), or paying a portion of the costs for the low-cost maker kits which we often have to buy in large numbers given the scale at which we work with each government partner. Our kits are highly cost-effective, with 1 kit able to support a classroom of 30 students for a year for around USD 50.

While MakerGhat has largely been grant and donation driven so far, it is our aim to make our model financially sustainable in the long run by:

1. Focusing on more income-generating partnerships, where we are either

• Selling expertise and maker kits to educational institutions to offset some of our costs, particularly with private institutions catering to lower-income students
  (and/or)
• Building partnerships with institutions/organizations who are willing to share implementational costs for our free-service program with underserved students

2. Parallely continuing our donation drives and grant applications

3. Keep our implementational and material costs low and find teacher ambassadors to take our program forward in the long run, who want to do it for social good, and will get all the support needed from MakerGhat and its team. These ambassadors can be ex-students of the program, enthusiastic teachers, volunteers, fellows, and any other individual willing to work for social upliftment through the lens of STEAM-related programs. We have already completed a year of identifying such teachers and working with them through our year-long fellowship program, and these teachers are helping us grow and have an exponential impact that is more distributed and local.

1. We have already started working with partners who are paying us for our expertise and training.

2. Many of our government partners and organizational collaborators have started covering some of the overhead costs, reducing the expenses from MakerGhat's end