Art Workshop in Rural Schools of U.P.

Recently, I had the opportunity to visit low-cost rural schools in the Sahaspur and Dhanora regions of Western U.P. Up to 2,300 children in these schools are supported by Child Literacy, a fund-raising organization in the U.S. that supports the educational development of children, with a number of projects in India. (I am currently a Board Member of Child Literacy). These schools provide basic education to the children of daily wage earners in what are considered to be some of the poorest parts of the country, where over 90% of the people live below the poverty line, and child labor is painfully common.

In conjunction with my visit, we organized an art workshop for the students in the entire school. Our only instructions to the students were to draw whatever made them happy! It was wonderful to see the whole school come alive, as the students found a rare outlet for their creativity. The students drew everything from their favorite ice-cream and animals, to their dream home and their favorite super-hero!

Learn more about Child Literacy and its projects here.

NSEF Chapter Now At Anna University!

On October 15^th, I had the honor of inaugurating a chapter for NSEF at the historic Anna University in Chennai. The entrepreneurship cell at Anna, called Jugaad, will now also have a platform for students to discuss and explore ideas around social entrepreneurship. (Yay!)

Mr. M Sekar, Dean of Anna University, presided over the inauguration ceremony, which kick started NSEF’s Idea Conference. We invited notable social entrepreneurs from the Chennai region to come and share information and insights from their work with the students – L Kannan, founder of Vortex Engineering (http://vortexindia.co.in/) , and R Madhavan, founder of Agriculture Consultancy Management Foundation (http://agriconsulting.org/default.aspx). Mr. Kannan founded Vortex to develop appropriate technologies for rural India, such as low-cost ATMs that consume 90% less energy than a conventional ATM and can be run on solar power, while Mr. Madhavan has made commendable strides in using ACMF’s research and expertise to improve the productivity of small and marginal farmers, and in pursuing his mission of bringing prosperity to rural India. I provided an overview of social entrepreneurship, and spoke about how we at NSEF can help budding young social entrepreneurs realize their dreams for creating social impact.

We ended the conference with a social business plan competition, for which 10 student teams had 3 minutes each to pitch their idea. The students combined their engineering expertise, business acumen and passion for social change to come up with a variety of innovative ideas in the areas such as waste management, clean energy, and agriculture.

Kudos to the members of Jugaad for putting together a fantastic event!