Author: Vaibhav Krishnakumar

Asha: Final Thoughts

After four weeks of effort and hard work, I have finally reached the end of my internship with Asha. In this final week, I finished my project report – 6 research papers, full of 100s of statistics and images all summarised in 10 pages. My report highlights the severity and importance of youth unemployment and the need for skills development programs in India. I am currently waiting for feedback from the project leader to make any final changes required before I end my involvement with this project for Asha.

The report forms part of a bigger set of papers that will be presented to various organisations – Asha’s project partners – to ensure that Asha gets the help and recognition required to make an even bigger impact than at present.

Asha: Project Review

It has been a long and productive week, having had no less than 3 review meetings! By the end of last week, I had read through 5-6 key papers in the fields of youth unemployment and skills development challenges facing India. My task for the rest of the internship is to condense that information into a succinct 10 page report – no mean feat considering I have read more than 200 pages of interesting, useful and relevant information in addition to all the statistics collected. I am making good progress on the report and am on track to finish it by the end of the week.

Halfway with Asha

It’s now been two weeks and they’ve flown past! While by no means an expert, I can safely say I understand the issue of youth unemployment in much more depth now. Over the past week, I have been working on my mini-project which has now been confirmed.

Before comparing projects, it is important to finalise the criteria that will be used; they vary widely and can often be hard to measure. Prior to my involvement in the project, the team had created an Excel spreadsheet which brought the criteria together from different research papers. For my mini-project, I am going through these papers again and contextualising the criteria; this involves summarising the paper, focusing on the challenges faced by India in particular, and creating a model which can be used to compare projects.

An Introduction to Asha for Education

“Socio-economic equality through the education of underprivileged children” – This is the grand aim of Asha for Education, my host charity for the Insights scheme this summer. It has over 66 offices worldwide, running more than 300 projects in India to help improve the literacy levels of the poorest in society. The majority of the international ‘chapters’, as they are called, are responsible for fundraising. However as part of my internship, I am involved with the project analytics side of things.

With over 300 projects, some are bound to under-perform. On the other hand, there will be lots of projects that achieve their aims and make a difference in society.