Hunarbaaz

Only 2.4% of people of working age in India are formally trained in vocational education, most of them being unequipped with the mindsets or platforms needed for learning, sharing, and growing in an ever-changing world. As per reports, 343 million women are not even paid for formal work, and for others, stepping out of the house is still a luxury. On one end, there is a lack of exposure, especially in small towns and villages; and on the other, there are these people and spaces full of potential, just looking for a space to be acknowledged and supported. Having the ability and agility to adapt to changing times is the need of the hour, and it cannot be achieved without enabling the youth at the first mile to become changemakers for themselves and their communities. 

We are building a grassroots innovation network to enable learners of ages 24 and below at the first mile to get exposed to interactive content around community-driven entrepreneurship and civic action, learn from their community and beyond; and face their fears to become community leaders. We have designed this as an Audio Innovation Network built over a phone call (IVRS technology) with participative features and discussion circles conducted weekly in focus groups on the ground. The discussion circles are conducted by chosen representatives from the community, who are trained by us and given reference manuals and a forum to ask, co-create, and problem-solve. The audio and the print media content are created in vernacular language, in an easy-to-comprehend and data-oriented manner. We are also in the process of building a chatbot, for scaling the model for users with access to the internet with support from our partner organization, Gramvaani Community Media.

97% of our current registered participants belong to the 16-24 years age bracket. 44% of our participants are SSC pass, 38% HSSC, and 17% Graduates. These participants belong to rural regions of Jharkhand and Bihar, with limited to no internet connectivity, and/or the ability to get data recharges and almost 60% of these participants are women. Across our multiple pilots, we have seen them enjoy our content's storytelling format and vernacular language usage. They have felt that the activities shared, provide them with exposure and make the habit of problem-solving and tinkering easy to do. Almost 5% of the participants have already initiated some livelihood interventions or are in the process to do so. Participants have also been seen to especially love the aspect of peer learning over the call as well as in discussion circles on the ground. In particular, many women who didn't step out of their house earlier, have been seen to build the confidence to do something of their own. Some instances of peer learning across villages have also been observed, through idea transfusion and adoption purely over voice technology. We have also repeated certain activities in urban areas with a more privileged audience and the engagement levels seemed at par as seen in rural areas, making us confident of the relevance and desirability of our content across demographics.

My parents belong to a village in Northern India called Tanda, and I've done most of my schooling in a nearby city called Lucknow. I have been informally teaching as a hobbyist since I was in grade 6, but things took a professional turn somewhere in 2018 when I was questioning the value of work as part of my final semester in design. My field visits led me to skilled people who were doing unskilled labor because they didn't have a platform and means to adapt their skills to changing market needs, even though they had inherent potential. This made me feel closer to the kind of versatility, design thinking brings to the table. And I started wondering if a continuous network could be created for people at the grassroots themselves to learn these life skills like problem-solving, design thinking, communication, collaboration, etc. in a vernacular, relatable, accessible, and scalable manner. Continuity was an essential element both in terms of habit forming, as well as building a peer learning space for remote communities to gain exposure and keep adapting to the changing world over time. I started my explorations as an educator and built a low-cost maker space in the remote Himalayas followed by working in the country’s innovation policy think tank and then an NGO to understand challenges and opportunities at scale before registering an independent entity last year. Over these explorations, I got connected with my fellow teammates Sunil Rath and Rituparna Das who are fellow educators turned entrepreneurs and are now supporting me on this journey. Listening in and co-creation has been important aspects of our process and even during covid we actively leveraged IVRs features like Agent calling and voice recording to remain agile as per changing learner needs.

We are looking to connect with experts and build our mentor base as well as evolve our content around critical thinking skills and mindsets. We wish to learn from global leaders on how to best operationalize this mentor community so that it becomes self-sustaining over time. We also wish to explore synchronized, multimodal technology experiments to seamlessly enable an exchange of issues and ideas between mentors and mentees, for which we feel Solve can be a great platform. As our community leaders prepare to explore their independent interventions, monetary support to support their processes is definitely essential at this point, as we hope that their explorations bring in profits that can sustain their communities over time.

• The model is blended leveraging the best of technology along with in-person connects.
• We are providing contextualized content for entrepreneurship education, on multimodal, synchronized, accessible technologies. 
• Our content is designed keeping learner personas in mind and delivered in an engaging storytelling format, such that the audiences start relating to certain characters over time. The use of multiple characters doesn't just help in building relatability but also helps with lateral thinking and perspective building on the same activity piece. 
• The instructional design used in our episodes has had an observed impact on initiating active sharing, peer learning, and action.
• The design is data-driven and iterations are based on actionable insights from our pre and post-engagement surveys, weekly on-platform interaction via key press and voice recordings, as well as images of worksheets collected during in-person sessions.
• We understand that the scale of the problem is huge and actively rely on collaborations to build our value chain such that the quality of our impact does not get compromised with pace as well as the experiences of other players in the market could be brought in. We also rely on our user inputs and co-create to learn from them as well as prepare them to take up leadership roles in time.

In the next five years, 

• We aim to reach more than 1 million registered participants with more than 60,000 unique listeners per episode, out of which more than 15,000 people are able to successfully become community leaders and agents of change for their communities. 
• We wish to create at least 25 skill-specific modules with 20 episodes each.
• We also see at least 5% of our learners joining our team to train new communities, thus building a hub and spoke model to solve challenges with mentorship at scale. 
• We see at least 30% of our revenue coming from contributions from the community themselves. 

In the next one year,

• We see the organization successfully setting up a multi-channel platform where people can continuously build a habit of change-making at scale.
• We wish to maintain a consistent user base of 10000 people who love our platform in the currently adopted 6 districts and register a minimum of 10 successful SHGs.
• We wish to co-create a rural youth fellowship with our partner Gramvaani Community Media where we can conduct intensive training for 100 community trainers on how to facilitate and measure problem-solving and critical thinking-based network for their communities.

SUCCESS MEASURES:

• No. of youth enrolled in the program. 

• No. of youth completing all the content. 

• Amount of engagement on different platforms. 

• No. of ideas registered/discussed internally. 

• No. of organizations engaged with youth to provide resources.

• No. of new ventures established. 

• No. of existing livelihood sources improvised.

• No. of youth working in diverse fields, post project.

VERIFICATION MEANS:

• Call retention data. 

• Progress tracker

• On-ground activities report

• Qualitative and quantitative interviews on experiential learning.

• Pre and Post engagement survey

• Power BI dashboard data

• Worksheet Images shared over Google Form with Habit and Mood Tracking Data

GOAL:

Providing aspirational pathways in entrepreneurship for the youth to become changemakers for themselves and their communities.

OUTCOMES:

Raising consciousness, enabling agency, and building capacity amongst youth through thought-provoking episodes, activities, questions, and conversations on real-life situations. 

OUTPUTS:

1. Tech-enabled Hunarbaaz Program

2. Mobilized Youth for the program

3. Developing an i-can attitude and entrepreneurial mindset in youth to bring tangible and intangible changes to their communities.

ACTIVITIES:

1.1 Develop relatable & contextualized content with the help of the community and spread it through IVRS & other accessible mediums.

2.1  Liaising with grassroots-level organizations.

2.2 Train the trainers/ground staff

2.3 Identifying community champions

2.4 Ensuring discussions amongst youth

3.1 Handholding for the proposed ventures/avenues

3.2 Connecting Youth with the needed resources and value chain linkage

We have built the core model as an audio network, built upon an interactive voice response (IVR) system, which can be accessed by a simple phone call, without the need for the internet.

This is supported by a synchronized mobile application as well as a Power BI dashboard at present.

We are in the process of prototyping a synchronized chatbot using Glific for users who are transitioning to smartphones.

Our founder, Ananya Agrawal is a New Media Designer from Uttar Pradesh, India, who has extensively traveled the Indian sub-continent to explore life skills education for the first mile. Our Strategy and Operations Lead, Rituparna Das is a native of West Bengal and a social science graduate. Apart from actively facilitating and training people, she has also served as a key resource person for a statewide government-led intervention in entrepreneurship education in government schools in Delhi. Our Business Development Lead, Sunil Kumar Rath, is a native of Orissa, India, and a management graduate. He has worked extensively in the social sector for more than 10 years, to understand the pulse of both the learners and decision-makers. Our Play Experience Designer, Swapnesh Samaiya, belongs to Madhya Pradesh and is an engineer turned game designer. He has a knack for making anything playful in a media-agnostic manner and has worked on government projects, and academic consulting, as well as with startups and NGOs on making learning delightful. 

Our learners have an equitable say in our work and we hold frequent co-creation workshops with them to bring their thoughts and opinions to the table. We also hold hackathons in urban design institutes and also buddy them up with local youth in our clusters to facilitate the exchange of thoughts and ideas. We hope to scale up these initiatives with mentorship and support from the Solve team.

BENEFICIARIES:

Youth from rural and tribal areas

KEY RESOURCES:

1. IVRS and App based platform

2. Recruiting operational resources from the community on the ground

3. Core program management team

4. Google Workplace

5. Adobe Creative Suite

6. Stationary and tools to support interventions

7. Space to conduct in-person activities

8. Printed resource material and campaigning material

KEY ACTIVITIES:

1. Develop relatable & contextualized content with the help of the community and spread it through IVRS & other accessible mediums.

2. Liaising with grassroots-level organizations.

3. Train the trainers/ground staff

4. Identifying community champions

5. Ensuring discussions among youth

6. Handholding for the proposed ventures/avenues

7. Connecting youth with the needed resources

SOCIAL VALUE PROPOSITION:

1. 21st century Education on critical thinking, problem-solving, tinkering, communication

2. Inclusive participation in change-making

3. Decent work and economic growth avenues

CUSTOMER VALUE PROPOSITION:

1. Increased self-awareness of interests and agency

2. A platform to listen, learn, create, be heard, and lead

3. Community building- in-person and online

4. Leaderboards and yearly recognition in the form of Certificate of participation, quiz master, and rising star

5. Eventual economic benefits

6. Dedicated one on one mentorship to chosen leaders

COST STRUCTURE:

1. Operations: state lead, district manager, on-ground facilitator

2. Technology: IVR service, additional experiment costs, 

3. MnE Human Resource Cost

4. Creative Software Licensing, Website Domain, Social Media Advertising + Marketing resource person cost

5. Door-to-door campaigning costs

6. Field visit and workshop costs- travel, stay, food, stationery

7. Program Management Human resource cost

8. Content writing, recording, editing, and translation costs

REVENUE STREAMS:

1. NGOs, rural incubators, and governments looking to tap into this space without having to build the know-how from scratch.

2. Segmented end customers looking for a deeper engagement (people with some access to the internet and paying capacity)

3. People who have received special benefits from us in terms of additional skill enhancement, market connect, and one on one mentorship (also builds accountability by having them invest in a small community fund once they become profitable)

We are not financially sustainable at present. We plan to give our content as a service to different organizations (NGOs in education, livelihood development sectors, rural incubators, brands working with artisans in villages), contextualizing it where needed, to their target geography. We plan to create print-based manuals as well as supported audio-visual content on our platform to ease this delivery process.

We also building a chatbot that supplements IVRS or our phone call-based tech. Once it's ready, we will charge a minimal subscription fee for this platform from users with smartphones. 

Apart from this, we plan to build a learn first pay later-community building fund where the small entrepreneurs who have successfully started work with our aid can deposit some money as a fee, which in turn gets used for supporting more small entrepreneurs from the region.

We have won one grant from Uplink Platform through which we received 25,000 USD 

We have started to build a revenue model by giving our instructional design service to an organization with a budget of 5,000 USD.