"Bringing Sustainability to Educational NGO's in India."
Literacy rate of India is around 65% and it has around 300 million illiterates. The distribution of this number is not uniform throughout the country, it differs from region to region. The policies and measures of the government also differ from state to state. The rest of this document discusses about the state of Tamilnadu, situated in the southern part of India. The literacy rate of the state is around 74%. Although the government is taking various measures to industrialize the rural areas, their livelihood largely depends on agriculture. Non guaranteed income and natural calamities still keeps many under poverty line. The lack of awareness and information combined with the poverty keep most of their children out of school, make them to work as child labours, again leading to poverty which makes the vicious cycle to continue. Because of the various steps taken by the successive state governments, the enrollment of students in primary school increased and it is very high nowadays and the number of school dropouts is also less compared to national average. Education is free till high school. Along with the free education, government provides free bus pass, free books, free uniform and free mid day meal. Mid day meal scheme is a very famous scheme which made a huge impact in the state. The key objectives of the program are: protecting children from classroom hunger, increasing school enrollment and attendance, improved socialization among children belonging to all castes, addressing malnutrition, and social empowerment through provision of employment to women. Due to the success of the program it is extended to the whole of India.
However the success in the primary school enrollment is not replicated in university level education and in maintaining the quality of education. There are two main reasons for this,
One: Lack of awareness among them and lack of sources of information to them.
Two: Financial Constraints.
This is where most of the Educational NGO's come into picture. Generally the NGO's concentrate on providing financial assistance to the students and in training and creating awareness about the opportunities available to them. In the recent times, the number of NGO's started by IT Professionals within India is on the rise. Many NGO's are funded by Non Residing Indians and it is run by a group of volunteers. Funding and volunteers form the two major backbones of NGO's. So, to bring sustainability to the NGO's we have to bring sustainability in funding and in getting volunteers.
Tamilnadu contains around 350 Engineering colleges and around 1200 arts and science colleges. Almost all the Colleges contains a social service unit called National Service Scheme, popularly known as NSS. Few of the main objectives of NSS are
- To enable the students to understand the community in which they work.
- To understand themselves in relation to their community.
- To identify the needs and problems in the community in the solution of which they can be involved.
Each college contains around 50 members and yearly they go for an camp, mostly to a nearby village which is funded by the Government of India. General activities during the camp are cleaning, afforestation, organizing health camps and creating awareness on social problems, education, cleanliness etc. Apart from the camp they also involve themselves in other social activities like organizing blood donation camps, visit to nearby orphanage etc. If the NGO's can tie up with NSS units of few colleges there will be steady flow of educated and socially active volunteer. NGO's can encourage them, to produce training materials for the school students, in providing computer training to the nearby villages, in organizing seminars in the rural areas about the educational opportunities available to them and about the job opportunities related to the education.
Most of the NGO's doesn't have a business model and it depends heavily on funding. The business model of Digipolly (Its the name of a fictional company which we created for the course) suits them as well. The basic Business idea of Digipolly is by outsourcing basic BPO jobs like data entry, medical transcription, web design, digital posters design, etc to the Students.
NGO's have lot of advantages with respect to this business model, many NGO's have people who are in good position and have good network, which will help them in getting the customers for the business. There are many IT Professionals involved in the NGO's who can help in providing training to the students. Their NGO tag will help them in improving the credibility and they can try for partnership with companies like Samasource (http://samasource.org) or Desicrew (www.desicrew.in) to goto the clients or they can partner with some social entrepreneurs to get help in structuring the business. NGO's also have students who are getting scholarships from them, whom they can employ in this business. It also gives a sense of satisfaction among the students as they will get salary for their work and they are standing in their own legs, instead of getting favour from others.
References:
http://nlm.nic.in/literacy01_nlm.htm
http://labour.nic.in/cwl/ChildLabour.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-day_Meal_Scheme
http://www.tamil-nadu.ngosindia.com/
http://nss.nic.in/intro.asp
