Charity Insights

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. As a first step, it will be presented to the Education secretary at the Indian High Commission in London to create tie-ups with government based agencies in India. In particular, in the news recently, the Indian government has launched a new “Skill India” initiative to tackle the very problem that I cover in my report – Asha hopes to get involved with this scheme and this is a good first point of contact.

However, this is only the beginning. As a charity, Asha is always on the lookout for volunteers. At Imperial in particular, there is a lack of undergraduate presence.  Once the academic term begins again, I hope to continue my involvement with Asha by liaising with the Imperial Indian and Hindu Societies to encourage more undergraduates to volunteer in their free time. It is immensely rewarding and hopefully my experiences can encourage others to undertake similar projects in the holidays.

Before finishing off, I would just like to say a quick thank you to Vidhya Sridhar and Anant Jani, my Imperial supervisor and project leader respectively, who have helped and guided me over the last month. It has been an excellent “introduction to the workplace” for me as this was my first internship and I hope to continue working with Asha in the future.

My project report (which is subject to change as mentioned above) is available from my Department of Computing website here – http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~vk714/InsightsReport.pdf

Read Asha: Final Thoughts in full

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.

Saturday was a big day as I met the entire team for a project review. Each member had focused on pulling the metrics from one of the papers – in this context, my summary was extremely important as it acts as the link between their metrics. It was discussed and scrutinised in some detail; I have receive feedback on it so as to improve and add to it in the final week. The biggest addition – a product of the meeting – is the finalised metric which is a set of 8-10 questions that each Asha project dealing with skills development has to answer when requesting more funding. This is then used as a measure of success, comparing it to other Asha projects and published averages from third party schemes before a final decision is made on approving the funding.

Here is a sneak preview of the report (not that you can see much…). The full version will be online next week, see my final blog post for the link!

And here is the Imperial team of Asha volunteers – Vidhya, Himadri (PhD students, EE Department) and me with Himadri’s daughter who made a guest appearance at our team meet!

Read Asha: Project Review in full

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. Here is an example:

Taken from one of the papers I have been reading, it gives the flowchart of a typical intervention that aims to deal with youth unemployment. This particular one focuses on TVETs – Technical Vocational Education and Training programs. A suitable criteria could be based on inputs (time invested, financial cost etc.) or outputs (skills gained by beneficiary, their salary etc.). The difference between outputs (which are individual to the beneficiary) and outcomes (which are large-scale changes, such as productivity of the company or rate of unemployment) is important when choosing criteria for success. I am currently working on a framework which outlines what my project report will cover. I will then start writing the report, aiming to finish it next week so I can get feedback and improve it before a final submission in week four.

Finally, to finish off, I just wanted to emphasise the importance of context in the papers I have been reading. This statistic highlights it particularly well:

• “ITCs spend 61.2% of their expenditure on staff“.
• “ITIs spend 92.1% of their expenditure on staff”.

ITIs and ITCs are institutions that are involved in running the TVET program, with the key difference being source of funding – ITIs are funded (at least partially) by the Government whereas ITCs are private institutions. As the author goes on to mention, this seems to imply that ITCs are more efficient with their allocated budget. However, the reality is that ITCs are often understaffed and employ teachers who lack training – naturally this leads to lower salaries and a lower spending on staff for ITCs. This simple difference can skew the comparison significantly, leading to a biased and unfair representation of the programs. This is a systematic error that needs to be dealt with before project comparison begins – and it is one which I am helping to solve!

Read Halfway with Asha in full

“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. Part of my task is to analyse and compare different projects and come to a judgement about the reason for the outcome. The lessons that can be learned from one successful project can then be applied to other struggling ones. To narrow the field of projects, I spent the first week getting to know my target area well – youth unemployment projects.

This is the problem I am helping to solve. The graph on the left shows the population demographics for China, with male in blue and female in orange; the graph on the right shows the same for India. China, over the last few decades, had a transition from right to left. This signifies an increase in the workforce (the population aged 15 to 59) and resulted in economic growth and improvement in standards of living for much of the population. To take advantage of this, policies need to be implemented to combat youth illiteracy and unemployment, something which India is yet to do. It is expected that India’s demographics will mirror those of China’s by 2040, giving the country about 25 years to take advantage of this demographic dividend. Asha has many projects which help with this, especially targeting disadvantaged and underprivileged youth.

In the first week, I have mainly been reading up on the background of the situation. This is key to understanding the impact that the projects are having in their rural communities. In addition, the analysis has already been going for about 6 months; I have the remainder of the week to look over the data that has been collected so far. This will prepare me well to start my own mini-project next week, finishing off with a report on my findings. I look forward to completing that by the end of the month!

Read An Introduction to Asha for Education in full