Radha Utnoor, a 37-year old cook and domestic helper goes to five different homes in Girgaum. A single mother of two, the lady is uneducated and was forced to marry when she was 16. She has often said she feels angry that her parents didn’t let her finish schooling and arranged her marriage very early to a man whom she didn’t know. Radha says her mother’s defence is that they were too poor to take on the burden of three growing girls.

After marriage, Radha moved into an 8-foot room, at a row house in the prime area of Mumbai city, opposite Charni Road station. This line of row houses is just outside Hinduja College, a daily inspiration for Radha to send her children there. Like most migrant labourers, Radha took to the easiest job that she knew—to cook, wash vessels and clean a house—as a domestic worker.

As soon as she got two children, she had resolved to send her children to English medium schools but her family wasn’t in favour. Radha’s estranged husband was, in fact, dead against educating the children. Her husband felt that educating his children was a waste and wanted them to begin work. Radha bravely fought to enrol them in English schools.

Like Radha, there are scores of domestic helpers, cooks and menial paid workers who believe that English education is the tool for progress and betterment. According to Maharashtra government statistics, there are 30 lakh domestic workers the state. There are more than 11,300 domestic workers registered with some union or organisation.  Ghar Kamgar Molkarni Sanghatana leader, Babli, corroborates the fact that domestic workers prefer to enrol their children in English medium schools rather than in Marathi or Hindi schools.

Babli says that over 60 percent of children of domestic workers have been enrolled in English medium schools. Though not many first generation learners pursue higher studies, these families still have a strong belief that English will help their children get better jobs than washing vessels. Babli, on the other hand, believes that this is just the marketing of neo-capitalism.  But apart from aspirations, which all have, the fact that companies prefer English-speaking workers is clearly reflected in the better job profile, higher salary category and better career mobility of these candidates.

Even though parents are unable to teach English at home or even understand it, parents like Radha have stood by their belief. Just because they were deprived of a good education, are their children bound to the same fate? Convent schools play a large role in ensuring this is not the case, promoting a mission of equality and fairness in society.  The fact that many children of domestic workers are enrolled in convent schools seems to be helping.

It is still not easy for domestic workers. Since their children are first generation learners, not all of them live in conducive learning environments. Many women face abuse and often, this violence is endured by children as well. The unions and schools, especially convents, are working to address this issue through constant interaction with parents and by giving special attention to the children.

Domestic workers incur more expenses as they need to hire tuition teachers, but in Mumbai especially, domestic workers are helped by their employers, according to labour unions. Working in good homes obviously helps the workers to aspire for a better life for their children, inculcating the belief that speaking English opens many doors.

One would tend to believe that eventually there will be a time when there won’t be workers doing menial jobs. However, Anjali Kanitkar, Associate Professor at College of Social Work says that will take many more years. There will always be a turnover of domestic workers, as many migrate to cities for a better living. According to the unions in this sector, every month they get enrolments in double digits. There are still immense disparities in India and a formal education, as it is, doesn’t seem yet to be an adequate equalizer.

About the Author:
Neeta Kolhatkar

Neeta Kolhatkar is a senior journalist with over 20 years experience reporting on various sectors and issues. She gives a candid report on the realities that exist in our society.

“My boarding school education had a lot of focus on sports and extra-curricular activities. Sports played a big role in shaping my character and help me deal with many problems and difficulties including the early demise of my father. Since then, sports has stayed with me throughout my life. Though never a real competitive sportsman, I played all sports whenever there was a chance and it helped me make friends, relieve stress, connect to colleagues and peers in a unique manner.”

Project K.H.E.L. (Kids Holistic Education and Life-skills) is among the few initiatives in India that use sports as a medium for empowerment. We caught up with Akshai Abraham, the Founder and Volunteer CEO of the organisation to know more about his idea and Project KHEL.

Project KHEL: The Model

KHEL is a synergistic mix of “Sports for Development” and “Life-skills Education” approaches. A unique program which helps children from disadvantaged backgrounds grow into responsible and contributing members of society.

We partner with organisations working with orphans, street children, slum children, village children, children in shelters and children of migrant and domestic labour. Working with these children does not mean a one-time or short duration interaction. We ensure that it is a bi-weekly interaction, over at least a 4 month period so that children get the full benefit of the programme.

The sessions are based on experiential and activity-based learning models where the children are encouraged to discover and express the learning from the session on their own through a discussion at the end of each session.

The sessions help children develop critical thinking and problem solving skills, build their sense of personal worth and agency, and teach them to interact with others constructively and effectively. In addition, we also conduct special thematic sessions on issues such as health, sanitation, substance abuse, personal hygiene, civic sense, and sexual abuse.

Project KHEL: The vision

Since July 2012, we have worked with over 400 children with 6 partner organisations in Lucknow and nearby villages. The vision is to expand operations across Uttar Pradesh (initially) moving into rural areas and then across India. This would give us a huge network of beneficiaries and KHEL can then become a platform for various development messages targeted for children and youth.

I believe in the power of collaboration and working with the strengths of others. Already, Project KHEL works with partners for its programme instead of duplicating efforts. After scaling the programme we would have a huge number of children enrolled and interacting with us regularly so if, for example, an organization wants to reach out to adolescent girls for awareness on personal hygiene – we would be able to provide that platform of target beneficiaries.

Project KHEL thus goes beyond sports to achieve goals in health, education, gender equality, child protection, vocational training and life skills.

Volunteering at Project KHEL

I have been a volunteer for varied causes and believe that it really adds value to one’s growth and life experiences. At KHEL, we have only 2 full time employees but several part-time and volunteer coordinators, coaches and founder members.

For a young organisation, we get quite a few requests for volunteering. An important part of KHEL is establishing a relationship between coordinators and children. Our volunteers are part of the KHEL family – they are featured on our website, we do events together, we go out for movies, meals etc.

As Franziska Litwinski (or Franky didi as she is fondly called by the children), a German student who volunteered with us for 5 months says “we shared moments of uncontrolled laughter, of long conversations, of comfortable silences, but also faced difficulties, misunderstandings, bad moods, uncertainty – only to make up again. I learnt a lot, especially crucial things about myself, mostly things I am yet to implement and work on.”

You can read our volunteer’s blog posts at projectkhel.com/blog.

Anyone looking for an extremely fun and fulfilling volunteering opportunity (just a few hours per week but long term commitment – at least 4-6 months) is most welcome. Our volunteers learn a lot about themselves while interacting with children in a totally fun manner.

Crowdfunding

As a start-up with less than one year of operations, we are constantly struggling for funds. However, in the absence of institutional funding, our work seems to speak for itself and we have a lot of support from individuals who identify with what we do. Crowdfunding is a concept which we have embraced not just as a medium to raise funds but also as a means to involve more people in our cause and make us accountable to them. We have also found that many think that their small contributions will not be enough, but in fact, people have donated amounts as small as Rs.100 or 200 and we are appreciative of all the small contributions as they all add up. At present, we are coming to the end of a campaign on an Indian crowdfunding platform (www.wishberry.in/Join-the-KHEL-15933). With just about 10 days left, we are hopeful to achieve our target as it is in the last few days of the campaign that people see their contributions making the gap between “amount raised” and “target” smaller.

If you are in Lucknow, we recommend you visit Project KHEL and the amazing work they are doing; but remotely you can also help by spreading awareness about their work; engaging on their facebook page and raising funds through their crowd-funding campaign at Wishberry. 

Akshai Abraham

Akshai is an MBA from the prestigious Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM), Bhopal. He has over 7 years of experience including 6 years in the social sector in the areas of research, program development, project management and organization building and also a year’s international experience as a cultural exchange intern in Austria. Akshai has also worked as a Consultant with AMS Consulting, where he was primarily involved with social sector studies commissioned by international agencies such as the World Bank, USAID, UNICEF, etc. and also with Aide-et-Action, an international NGO where he worked in fund-raising and education development programmes. A keen sportsman and enthusiast, and a committed non-profit professional, Akshai’s vision is to impact the lives of underprivileged children and youth of India through KHEL.

The views expressed above are those of the author, and not necessarily representative of the views of the Mahindra Group.

Last year’s demonstrations in Chile and Colombia are a cause for major concern for their respective governments. At the center of the debate there is a very simple question for which there is not an easy answer: who is supposed to pay for the provision of education for the inhabitants of a country? The citizens themselves and their families, or the state? Is a direct subsidy to the students the best approach, or should institutions be subsidized in order to make education more affordable?

In both the Chilean and Colombian cases, there have been in somewhat different paths taken in matters related to the development of their respective higher-education systems, but both are experiencing similar situations in terms of strikes and public student demonstrations, which make not only their respective governments nervous but also those from neighboring countries.

In the case of Chile, massive liberalization of the higher-education system in recent years with limited public investment has led to impressive growth of the national higher-education infrastructure and to a significant increase in the number of Chileans having access to higher education (currently, 51 percent of college-age inhabitants), mostly due to the increased offerings by private institutions. In order to support such growth, the government has allowed higher-education institutions to charge high tuition and fees while establishing a public/private financial-aid mechanism in order to make education affordable to the majority of students. At the same time, the government kept a selective merit-based full tuition waiver scholarship for students having the highest scores in a national standardized admission test. In addition, the government maintained a subsidy scheme to a small group of public and private institutions who were members of the Council of Rectors (CRUCH for its acronym in Spanish).

Despite these efforts, growth in Chilean higher education has not been exempt from problems. A prominent issue that has emerged is that the great majority of Chileans having access to higher education finish their studies with significant debt, while the generous tuition-waiver scholarship tends to benefit students who come from better-off families who previously attended private high schools. In other words, it seems like taxpayer resources are used to subsidize those in less need, while the majority of Chileans assume a proportionally higher burden in order to pursue university studies. Finally, in recent years a variety of for-profit higher-education institutions have emerged. Although these institutions are properly accredited and offer an educational quality similar to other universities, they have become a natural target of demonstrators.

The Colombian case is somewhat different: a smaller and even more selective higher-education system has not grown at the same pace as the nation’s demographic trends, and every year there are about 600,000 students graduating high school out of which only a small portion advances to the higher-education system. Concerned with such a challenge, the government decided to embrace a major reform aimed at massively increasing the number of students in higher education from 37 percent to an ambitious 50 percent enrollment of college-age students by the year 2014. In order to finance such growth, the government of President Santos initially entertained the idea of allowing the presence of private, for-profit providers. However, due to pressure from different sectors concerned with the implications of privatization of higher education, the government decided to drop the idea from a proposed law being discussed by the national Congress.

For some sectors of our societies the answer is simple: education is a basic human right – therefore governments (and taxpayers) should bear the cost of the provision of higher education while offering it at minimum or no cost to students regardless of their socio-economic status. Also, many argue that admission policies should become more flexible and that massive public investment should be dedicated to finance infrastructure and operations in public higher-education institutions. On the contrary, other sectors consider that such an approach is just not sustainable in the long run, and that rather than directly subsidizing institutions, governments should make available scholarships and loans directly to the students based on a combination of economic need and academic merit. Also they argue that participation of private providers of education–including for-profit entities–should be permitted to foster competition and improve efficiency, assuming that they are properly regulated.

Those are some of the issues being debated not only in Chile and Colombia, but also in many other countries. As my colleague Dewayne Matthews of the Lumina Foundation tells me, the challenge faced by many countries is how to provide quality education to much larger numbers of students knowing that increasing institutional capacity is not something that can be achieved quickly, especially in a time of finite financial resources. In these cases, governments investing in education may be required to de-invest in other equally important priorities. Also, it is becoming clear that implementing reforms will necessarily affect the status-quo in higher education systems. In summary, we face a complex reality for which no simple solutions exist.

At the end of the day, the social unrest experienced in Chile and Colombia brings the discussion to the fundamental question that societies face in today’s world: Is higher education a public or a private good? Consequently, who should pay for it? La moneda está en el aire.

This article was originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education at the following URL: http://chronicle.com/blogs/worldwise/who-should-pay-for-education/28784

Francisco Marmolejo is the Executive Director of the Consortium for North American Higher Education Collaboration (CONAHEC), a network of more than 130 colleges and universities primarily from Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. Francisco also serves as Assistant Vice President for Western Hemispheric Programs at the University of Arizona and has taught at several universities and has published extensively on administration and internationalization. Marmolejo has consulted for universities and governments in different parts of the world, and has been part of OECD and World Bank peer review teams conducting evaluations of higher education in Europe, Latin America and Asia.

Like most people in the field, I became involved in international education mostly by accident. Born and raised in Ojuelos de Jalisco, a small rural town in central Mexico (also known among friends as “the capital of the world” in an attempt to boost our self-esteem), I never imagined that someday I would be spending most of my time traveling the world to learn about the similarities and peculiarities of higher education from a policy and operational perspective.

My first formal introduction to international higher education occurred back in Mexico more than 20 years ago when I was working as Vice President at the University of the Americas, a private higher education institution located in Mexico City. There I met a professor, Todd Fletcher, and a top administrator, Celestino Fernandez, from the University of Arizona who were visiting our institution. They made me aware of the great opportunities to participate in international exchanges that could be made available to our students. I bought into the concept of international exchanges as they presented it very easily since I personally experienced the positive impact of leaving my own  “comfort zone” when, as a 12-year-old,  I traveled from my hometown to another city in order to attend middle school. It was clear to me that providing an international experience to students would make a great difference in their lives and, in the long run, in the communities in which they would live and work.

As it turned out, I myself was one of the first individuals to “go on exchange” to the University of Arizona.  After that first encounter with the UA visitors, I began organizing a reciprocal visit for the President of the Universidad de las Américas to Tucson. To my surprise, she asked me to join her for the visit even though she knew that my English was very rudimentary. It would be my first visit to the United States and I was really excited, but much more nervous. Fortunately, Tucson is a very bilingual community, as is the University of Arizona, which made me feel at home. Nevertheless, I made the usual mistakes such as asking for “soap” at a restaurant or assuming that the abbreviation “Dr.” in the name of a street was in honor of a Doctor rather than referring to a “drive.” In the event it would be needed, I had memorized a short speech in English about the Universidad de las Américas. As it turned out, during the visit, I vividly remember a meeting at which the President of my university was discussing something with a group of UA faculty members (which, of course I could barely understand due to my limited English). Suddenly she turned to me to ask for an explanation. Totally confused, I reacted by repeating my short speech about the University. My President later told me that the question wasn’t about the subject of my speech but that in any case the information was useful.

Anyway, after this painful but exciting experience, I became captivated by the world of international education and realized how important it was to learn a second language. At the same time, I learned to recognize that when seeing higher education from an international perspective, we must properly value the important differences that exist among higher education systems rather than make simplistic assumptions about them from pre-conceived notions based on our own framework. It became very evident to me that the international dimension in higher education is not merely a luxury but a necessity in today’s world.  If a key role of higher education institutions is to prepare future graduates with adequate skills to work in an increasingly interconnected and furiously competitive world, while developing their sense of social responsibility to the local community in which they live, international education must be seen as central rather than marginal to the functions of our colleges and universities. Why doesn’t this happen?

The current state of affairs in international education is far from perfect. There are many issues to be addressed and challenges to be confronted, which I hope readers will be interested in discussing in this blog.

Let’s take this journey together.

Francisco Marmolejo is the Executive Director of the Consortium for North American Higher Education Collaboration (CONAHEC), a network of more than 130 colleges and universities primarily from Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. Francisco also serves as Assistant Vice President for Western Hemispheric Programs at the University of Arizona and has taught at several universities and has published extensively on administration and internationalization. Marmolejo has consulted for universities and governments in different parts of the world, and has been part of OECD and World Bank peer review teams conducting evaluations of higher education in Europe, Latin America and Asia.

Many scholars have argued with reason that higher-education institutions around the world are highly resistant to change. Some are even more critical, predicting that in the information-based economy, universities are condemned to disappear or become obsolete, at least in the way they currently function. Certainly, fostering and implementing change in colleges and universities can be a daunting task, as witnessed by many institutional leaders who have lost their jobs trying to change the course of their organizations. This sense of frustration in trying to foster change was cogently expressed by President Clinton about 15 years ago at a gathering of higher-education leaders when he sympathized with the work of a president of a higher-education institution and compared it to that of a cemetery’s administrator: they have many people under them, but nobody listens.

In 1998, Arthur Levine compared the challenges faced by higher-education institutions and the typical response to those faced when a ship is sinking after being hit by an iceberg. The captain decides the following actions in order of priority: to save the crew, to make sure that the show and entertainment continues as normal, to repair the ship and, at the end, if time allows, to save the passengers. A response by a university president employing the same rationale might be as follows: efforts are made to protect the faculty, resources are dedicated to assure that classroom activities continue, committees are created to address the problem, and in all likelihood, by the time that results are announced, it will be too late for graduating students.

One of the problems with university reform is that institutions cannot be shut down while repairs are made. But what about creating a new one? Well, that is not easy either, considering all that is required to establish a new higher-education institution. Nevertheless, all over the world many institutions are being created, especially in countries where demographic pressures are such that massive numbers of youth are demanding education. Just to mention some cases, in Mexico in the last six years a total of 105 new universities were established; in India the government has said that to be able to attend the huge demand for higher education it will be necessary to build 1,000 new universities by 2020; in China the number of higher-education institutions went from around 1,000 in 2000 to almost double that at the end of the decade; and in Brazil a total of 1,512 new higher-education institutions were established from 1997 to 2009.

When new institutions are created from scratch, it represents a unique opportunity. During my trips to different countries, occasionally I learn of a new institution being established and I am always curious to know to what extent institutional leaders are simply emulating other institutions, and how much they are willing to risk in doing something innovative and different.

A good example of an institution trying a new model is Albukhary International University (AIU) in Malaysia. Supported by the Albukhary Foundation, and established by a prominent Malaysian entrepreneur and philanthropist, AIU is a non-religious, residential, private institution located in Alor Setar, a community located in the northern part of Malaysia, very close to the border with Thailand. This institution, with superb, brand new facilities, just opened its doors to a first cohort of undergraduate students from 47 countries (with only a small number being from Malaysia). Since all students receive a full scholarship, which covers all tuition and fees, and all living expenses during their entire duration of studies, a necessary condition of admission is that they must belong to a low-income family and to come from an underprivileged or disadvantaged background. In order to develop basic knowledge of English among all students, an optional six-month English immersion program is offered to those arriving with the minimum required TOEFL score of 440. All students begin their regular education with one year of general education content packed into 15 trimester-based courses from mathematics and learning and thinking skills, to leadership and community-service projects. The following three years, students can major in accounting, business administration, or computer science with emphasis on software engineering or networking offered by the school of business studies and information and communications technology. Future plans include establishing a school of humanities and social sciences.

Interestingly, though Malaysia is a Muslim country, AIU is not an Islamic university. Also, interestingly, all students are mandated to conduct community service for the underprivileged and disadvantaged in the local community in which AIU is located. Also they will be required to return to their respective countries at graduation.

As explained by the vice chancellor of AIU, Dzulkifli Abdul Razak, an energetic and well-known educator, and former vice chancellor of the prestigious Universiti Sains Malaysia, AIU pretends to innovate using the metaphor of a “humaniversity” in which they intend to “make available high quality and relevant education based on equity and access with success across the many existing global divides.”

Too good to be true? Of course, it is too early to know how successful AIU may be in accomplishing its goal, and many questions remain to be answered, ranging from its long-term financial viability, to the capacity of graduates to adapt and become effective change agents on their return to their respective countries. Also, formidable challenges remain in recruiting and retaining innovative faculty members also willing to venture into new pedagogical territories, and in creating the adequate environment to fully maximize the multicultural richness existing on campus, just to mention a few. Nevertheless, it is great to learn about efforts happening in the world to recreate higher education. As expressed by Vice Chancellor Dzulkifli, AIU may serve as “a new inspiration for a university of the future” in which graduates may help to “shape the journey to a sustainable and peaceful future.”

What do you think? If you could start a university from scratch, what would be its mission?

This article was originally published here in English, and in Spanish by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Francisco Marmolejo is the Executive Director of the Consortium for North American Higher Education Collaboration (CONAHEC), a network of more than 130 colleges and universities primarily from Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. Francisco also serves as Assistant Vice President for Western Hemispheric Programs at the University of Arizona and has taught at several universities and has published extensively on administration and internationalization. Marmolejo has consulted for universities and governments in different parts of the world, and has been part of OECD and World Bank peer review teams conducting evaluations of higher education in Europe, Latin America and Asia.

In Nigeria, where 70 per cent of the population live below the poverty line, one man has sparked social change by broadcasting educational information about agriculture to poor farmers living in remote areas.

Nigeria is Africa’s leading oil producer and the agricultural sector has been neglected in favour of the big, quick profits that oil can bring. Wealth is unevenly distributed and half of its 160 million people live in endemic poverty, struggling to survive on less than $2 a day in rural villages where running water, electricity, healthcare and roads are scarce.

Making the change

After discovering radio at an early age, Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu always wanted to be a journalist. Instead, he channelled that enthusiasm into setting up a radio station in the Obitti village in the Imo state, which reaches poor rural farmers with information about sustainable farming practices and how to start their own businesses.

“I had a burning desire and passion in me to do something that would create social change in agriculture. I started the organisation with no staff and no money, set up in my parents’ house,” said Ikegwuonu.

In the Imo state 3 million depend on agriculture to survive and the Smallholders radio service has been invaluable, as these farmers do not own a TV and rely on their battery powered radio as a source of information.

Since 2007, 65% of his radio programme listeners have nearly doubled their household income by increasing production.

“I believe what you need is the passion, determination and commitment to excel in any profession which you love,” said Ikegwuonu.  “The moment you love your work, you will generate fresh thinking and new ideas.”

Ikegwuonu was just 21-years-old when he started the Smallholders Foundation, and now seven years later, the foundation is giving people a lifeline out of poverty.

The 28-year-old’s hard work has been recognised, and last year he was named “Young Person of the Year 2011”, by Nigeria’s most prestigious youth awards, The Future Awards.

“Being ‘The Young Person of the Year’ award is a great honour and a great privilege…to me, it means a call for greater action,” said Ikegwuonu.  “I will like to use the platform created by the award to engage other young people in Nigeria and promote three causes -entrepreneurship, education and girl empowerment.”

The Future

“Life in rural Nigeria is tough and good quality education coupled with real world experience will definitely go a long way to eradicate poverty,” said Ikegwuonu.

The foundation, which won the 2011 Educating Africa Award for Entrepreneurship in Education, aims to expand and move from its present community radio status to a county wide radio, reaching 3.5 million listeners across the Imo state.

In the next 5 years, they intend to establish 5 regional radio stations across Nigeria to reach 90 million small farmer listeners, driving the next green revolution across Nigeria.

Ikegwuonu’s advice for young people in Nigeria is: “Do something for Nigeria. You are not doing it to gain attention, but to improve the lives of those who benefit.  Aim to achieve big, but start small. This will enable you have an impact. Don’t let failures, disappointments and the problems in Nigeria to frustrate you. Consider them as part of the learning process.”

Tania considers herself to be an impulsive 20 year old journalism student studying at the University of Kent. She is drawn to any kind of human rights story, and love traveling to see things for myself. Tania idealistically believe that good reporting can help change a dire situation for the better. She is currently spending her summer traveling Eastern Europe and experiencing a new culture.

The views expressed above are those of the author, and not necessarily representative of the views of the Mahindra Group.

CAMPINAS, Brazil – Brazil’s public school system is notoriously awful and so poor students struggle to pass the entrance exams into the country’s top universities. That means that most of those winning places at the best, tuition-free institutions are from the country’s moneyed elite.

Marcelo Knobel, Founder of Profis

One teacher at Unicamp, the highly rated state university in Campinas, 100 km from Sao Paulo, could see that high school talent was going to waste. So Marcelo Knobel decided to create a scheme to give promising students a way into his university.

The Interdisciplinary Higher Education Program, or Profis for short, offers the best students at Campinas’s 96 high schools entry into a two-year liberal arts preparatory course. If they pass they get a guaranteed place on a degree course.

“We get the best from each school,” Knobel said. “They know that they are getting the chance of a lifetime and they know to take it.”

Brazil is one of the most unequal societies in the world, particularly when it comes to education. Some 85 percent of those who finish public high school here in Sao Paulo state, Brazil’s richest and most populous, attend private schools. More than half the public high schools in the Campinas region do not send even one student to Unicamp. And although around half of Brazilians consider themselves black or dark-skinned, just 14 percent of students at the university are mixed race.

Those who make it onto the Profis course have a different profile. Forty percent are black or dark-skinned. Eighty per cent come from families who earn less than the minimum wage. And 86 percent are the first person in their family ever to attend university.

The program has only just admitted its second year of students and teachers already admit the challenges are huge. Students admit struggling with the step up. Some are unprepared for the increase in workload. A few believe the other students look down on them. Course coordinators says that only half the group is likely to pass the course in the allotted time and that many will have to do a third year.

Knobel said that because many kids come from disadvantaged backgrounds it is important to especially important to help them both on and off the campus.

The poorest 60 % of students get a monthly stipend equivalent to the minimum wage, which is important to poor families who might prefer their children to work rather than study. They also get medical support, teachers assistants, food and transport. And when students falter, professors do all they can to bring them back into the fold.

Education experts have lauded the program as a clever way of improving social inclusion. Although many of Brazil’s public universities have some kind of quota system in place, either for Afro-descendents or for the disadvantaged, Profis is so far unique.

Knobel hopes it can emerge as an example to others.

“I think this can be reproduced at any university,” he said. “It is not expensive. If Unesp does it and if USP does it and Unicamp does it then we’ll get 5 % of students involved and then it can start to be relevant.”

Andrew Downie fled a factory job in Scotland almost 20 years ago and set off to find adventure in Latin America. Since then he has lived in Mexico, Haiti, and now Brazil, writing and reporting for publications such as The New York Times, Time magazine, Esquire and GQ. He spent eight years in Rio de Janeiro and currently lives in São Paulo.

The views expressed above are those of the author, and not necessarily representative of the views of the Mahindra Group.

Chetan Bhagat’s “Five Point Someone” and subsequent hit film “3 Idiots” may have made the Indian Institute of Technology infamous on a world scale, but their competition for both entry and matriculation have long been famous in India. Known for their rigorous course loads and unmatched job placement rates, IITs receive some of the most competitive applicant pools in the country.

Across India, 90% of the students who attend IITs have undergone rigorous tutoring in addition to conventional classroom learning. Known as “coaching,” these tutoring sessions occur in order to prepare students for the IIT-JEE exam. Of the 500,000 students who take the exam each year, only 2% pass.  The Indian coaching industry is worth over $2 billion dollars a year – drawing proceeds from student’s families who have the means to afford extra coaching beyond the fees of private schools.

Many students from disadvantaged backgrounds do make it to an IIT through self-study and their own jugaad.  The ones that do are faced with the struggle to compete and maintain their academic standard in such a foreign environment.  With limited mentors or role models from their own schools and communities, students lack alumni contacts or guidance. They face the insurmountable task of adjusting to the unique IIT lifestyle on their own and in finding employment post-graduation without a network.

A variety of factors contribute to these challenges: students from disadvantaged backgrounds often have little opportunity to interact with other academically focused youth, or access to the networks that will help them excel. Their families may send them to school, but depend on them to work after class to contribute to the family income, thus limiting study time. The challenges a student can face are limitless.  In the years prior to the IIT Examination, middle class and wealthy students spend hours a day in tuitions that are out-of-budget and out-of-reach for most Indians.

Avanti Fellows, an NGO founded in Mumbai and now present across seven cities in India, is working to address these challenges through an intensive tuition and mentorship program. Avanti was founded in 2010 by Krishna Ramkumar and Akshay Saxena, IIT-Bombay graduates who had seen the struggles of a close friend from a disadvantaged background. Though their friend made it to IIT from a small village using borrowed books and teaching himself math and science, he lacked the confidence, guidance, and useful networks of his peers.

Ramkumar and Saxena graduated IIT Bombay and went on to work at the prestigious Boston Consulting Group, during which time they worked with an IIT mentorship program. By 2010 they were motivated by these experiences and pitched for the Stanford Bases Social Entrepreneurship Challenge with an idea to “provide bright, motivated students from low-income homes with the intensive support and mentoring they need to attend India’s top-tier colleges”. Their pitch was successful, and Avanti Fellows was born.

Avanti Fellows works to intervene with the brightest low-income students while they are in school, and prepare them holistically for the entrance exams, university life, and job-market after university to empower all students to reach their potential.  Avanti secures them free or heavily-discounted seats in some of the country’s best tuition programs, thereby providing access to a level-playing-field with other IIT applicants.

Avanti’s vision, however, goes beyond just free seats in coaching institutes. Additionally, each selected student (Fellow), is assigned a mentor who meets with each student and their family in their home. Mentors work with the student and families to develop an understanding of the rigors of the IIT entrance exam.  Avanti’s aim is to provide the Fellow with an optimum psycho-social environment to enable them to live up to their potential.

The mentorship program aims to educate the Fellows on goal-setting and effective study techniques while providing career and academic guidance. This includes assistance with internship placement.  Avanti’s program is not solely academic:  it encourages emotional development through recognition of the social systemic constraints of entering the IIT environment while improving equality of opportunity to access the opportunities of an IIT education.

To find out more about Avanti Fellows, visit www.avantifellows.org

Originally from a small town in Connecticut, Maeve graduated NYU Stern School of Business in 2010 with a degree in Economic Policy. She moved to India in search of professional challenge and personal enrichment and found plenty of both, through her job as a Management Consultant in Mumbai and explorations across the country. Prior to Consulting, she worked in Outdoor Education.

The views expressed above are those of the author, and not necessarily representative of the views of the Mahindra Group.

When Barack Obama became the 44^th President of the USA, I cheered so lustily that I was on throat lozenges and unpalatable salt water gargles for the next few days. Frankly, I didn’t care if he would be a good, bad or indifferent president – all I wanted was to see a different shade of colour in the White House. I love it when ridiculous barriers are broken!  I cheered even louder, however, when India’s Supreme Court upheld the Right to Education act where 25% of seats are reserved in certain categories of schools for the economically weaker section.  Just in case you’re curious, I was prescribed cough syrup for the next two weeks.

Even so, I know for certain that it’s not going to be a bed of roses. I grimly predict that some affluent parents will warn their children not to mingle lest they pick up germs and other filthy things – it’s sad isn’t it that all the money and the education in the world cannot make some human beings act like, well, humans?  Laughably, this attitude is from people who hire the parents of the very same children to cook their food, keep their houses spotlessly clean, drive their cars, tsk.

I also predict that not some but very many children in the economically weaker section will go home weeping after school and have emotional scars that will take years of expensive therapy to heal.  It’s only natural when a child of the driver of the Indian economy and a child of the driver of his car share the same space but not the same resources. Consider the expensive iPad versus the pocket-friendly Akash tablet (if and when Akash actually does work without glitches). Perhaps I’m being facetious here, but can Angry Birds really bridge that gap?

While we’re about it, let’s also consider the negative attitude of a few of India’s ridiculously expensive schools where students are routinely taken to villages in Thailand to hose down cows to make them (the students, not the cows) more balanced. Why Thailand instead of equally needy villages in India? Perhaps this has something to do with inflated travel and lodgings bills that are presented to parents – and teachers in charge of the trips getting free tickets?  With the RTE in place, would such indulgences be possible?

Finally, do you really believe that the government (whichever government happens to be in power) will cheerfully honour its promises and pay the fees for the reserved seats without tedious amounts of paperwork that will straggle into the next century?

So yes, I do have some fears about the reservations. But I’m biting my tongue. Mainly because the good that will eventually come out of it will outweigh the bad. Make no mistake, this is a revolution even though it’s not trending on Twitter. And despite the fact that it’s a bloodless revolution, some children will get hurt by the attitudes of nasty affluent parents, insensitive teachers and apathetic governments. That, however, is a price that must be paid.

Rupa Gulab is a columnist and the author of Girl Alone, Chip of the Old Blockhead, and The Great Depression of the 40s.

The views expressed above are those of the author, and not necessarily representative of the views of the Mahindra Group.

How do you help children from poor, rural communities to identify themselves as changemakers?

In order to break the cycle of poverty, people must be empowered to make change happen in their own lives. But in the rural community in South Africa where I work, change comes at a slow snail’s pace. I am always trying to discover new ways to teach children – many of whom who eat the same thing for dinner night after night and rarely leave their village – that they have the power to change things, to solve problems and to make a difference in their lives and in their world.

Bill Drayton, a renowned social entrepreneur and founder of Ashoka, envisions a world where everyone is a changemaker. And with his words in mind, I began to question people in the community.

Regina Hlabane, the thoughtful and articulate chairperson of the local weaving cooperative, likes the idea that children should learn that they can change the world. However, she adds, “First you must teach us how to change the world. We don’t know that, so how can we teach that to our children?”

She makes a good point.

Next, I speak with a local primary school teacher, Sonia Foure, who feels that children first must learn they can change themselves. They can learn to care for their clothes and their hair and their school books and then feel proud of themselves. “You don’t have to have money to take a rag and clean your shoes,” she says succinctly.

And Emerencia Mohlolo, the administrator at the local primary school, believes that success comes when children are encouraged to dream. She makes appointments with some of the poorest children to simply listen to them and encourage them to dream of what could be.

But it is as I watch children in an art class working with their teacher to paint the wall of the nursery school that my attention is truly captured. They are creating change in the most visceral of terms; an aged once-white wall is becoming a brightly colored mural of an elephant standing by a stream at dawn.

Walter Sibuyi, balanced on a rickety ladder with a can of red paint, begins the mural painting. But soon all the children have a paintbrush, a cut off plastic coke bottle paint container and an area to paint. They work hard with their teacher for three days and the completed mural is wonderful. The kids are proud of their wall and everyone who goes by notices the change and smiles at the elephant washing himself on the face of the nursery school.

Maybe being part of the team that transformed a white wall to a beautiful picture will begin to strengthen the changemaker muscle within these children. Maybe in art class they will have the experience of beginning with a blank white sheet of paper and ending with something bright and wonderful. Then they will get a taste of that heady creative power that effects change.

Just as Ashoka encourages finding innovative solutions to common problems, I am convinced we need to be just as innovative in finding new ways to give the future changemakers of the world the experience of creating change.

I watched art serve as an empowerment trigger. I would be interested to hear your ideas and suggestions for ways to help disadvantaged children understand their power to make things happen.

About the author:

Judy Miller divides her time between Portland, Oregon and Limpopo Province, South Africa. In 2000, she left a private counseling practice in Portland and spent the next ten years working in community development in rural South Africa. Currently, Judy continues to support the Mapusha Weaving Cooperative and the Katlego creche in Rooiboklaagte while working in Portland as a writer, speaker and teacher. Her passion is to inspire and to help create a vibrant global community with ever-deepening bonds of connection and understanding between peoples.

The views expressed above are those of the author, and not necessarily representative of the views of the Mahindra Group.