I was very fortunate to be able to spend time with Yacoobi last month at the Opportunity Collaboration, a convening on global poverty alleviation held in Mexico. She caught me up on the current situation in Afghanistan and her work at the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL). Yacoobi founded AIL in 1995 to provide teacher training to Afghan women, support education for boys and girls, and offer health education to women and children. About 200,000 students graduate every year from AIL’s programs, and Yacoobi estimates AIL has impacted 8.5 million Afghans. Yacoobi is the recipient of dozens of humanitarian, social entrepreneurship, and leadership awards for her incredible work over the last two decades.

The day Yacoobi and I met, it was a humid 90 degrees, but Yacoobi was wearing a hijab and a long, beautifully embroidered dark Afghan dress. She lit up with passion when talking about the progress being made and the hope of rebuilding Afghanistan. In every word she spoke, she was tireless and unwavering in her commitment to the people of Afghanistan. But at the same time, she seemed weary. She travels the world about 40 percent of her time, stop after stop, building support for AIL and change in Afghanistan. At home in Afghanistan, she works every day to make life better while surrounded by violence and uncertainty. Rebuilding Afghanistan is her life’s pursuit.

Yacoobi focused in on the improvements she’s seen over the last two years, her workshops for youth to engage them in civil society, and renewing her people’s connection to the earth.

“Women’s lives are changing rapidly for the good,” she said. “It’s changed 180 degrees. Women are going into professions of all kinds. But the women of Afghanistan still need the international community to back them up. It takes awhile—Afghanistan has been at war 30 years. Everything cannot be changed right away.”

“Afghanistan is doing better, the villages are cleaner, people are healthier, and people know more about hygiene and reproductive health. Now we need infrastructure support, and we need to develop our civil society.” On the other hand, she added, “security is worse this year than last year. I have to just ignore the whole thing as otherwise I couldn’t function.”

Yacoobi has been holding workshops on democracy, leadership, and peace, getting youth involved in civil society. “A highlight of my life is my emerging youth group,” Yacoobi told me. She recently took 25 students, ages 18-25, to a peace conference in India. Now the group meets once a month for discussions. Each student was asked to bring two others, and the group has swelled to over 200.

Yacoobi also spoke about wanting to work with young people to bring back the connection between the Afghan people and nature. “I feel strongly that we are living too separate from nature; we are disconnected from the soil.” Yacoobi said. “The soil has been so abused, by landmines, suicide bombers, and many things. The dirt is dead.” She cited the important teaching of 13th century poet Rumi, who wrote of this connection and the importance of “love, tolerance, wisdom, respect, and forgiveness.”

Yacoobi is tired of concentrating on the negative. “I love Afghanistan. I love the women and children of Afghanistan. I work with civil society, and I am not interested in politics. Afghanistan is still insecure; we still have war. But the best thing for me is to concentrate and continue with what I am doing.”

Charles was initially reserved, but within moments, his passion for social change took over, and he spoke eloquently and urgently about improving the lives of extremely poor Ugandans living in remote rural regions.
Charles has been with Village Enterprise for seven years and manages a staff of about 20, including 12 business mentors. These mentors must have “the ability to inspire,” noted Charles, as the villagers they will work with have to “overcome their fears to try something new.” Mentors work closely with a group of villagers in planning a business, operations, marketing, profit analysis, and record keeping. Many of the new businesses are growing high-value crops, including rice, sunflowers, and sesame or raising livestock such as goats, chickens, and pigs. The crops and livestock are sold at a local market or crops can become part of a value chain. Village Enterprise also provides financial training and small grants. The rural areas are so remote that they are rarely served by microlenders.

Charles, who has a BS in Forestry from the University of Makerere, came to his current role via his passion for conservation. After graduating, he worked in conservation but “it was difficult to implement conservancy in areas of extreme poverty,” he said. Preserving nature was secondary to doing what was necessary to survive, such as chopping down trees for charcoal. “The poor need alternative sources of income,” he said, adding that the top three challenges of his job are “building the self-esteem of women—telling them they can be just as enterprising as men—building the capacity of business mentors, and funding.”

Village Enterprise, launched in 1987, works in Uganda and Kenya with a three, three-pronged economic development model (grants, training, and mentoring). The organization has helped launch 23,000 new businesses, and 75 percent of the businesses are still continuing after four years. Dianne Calvi is the president and CEO.

The location of ‘Gbenga Sesan’s nonprofit couldn’t be more different from the rural communities where Village Enterprise operates. Paradigm Initiative Nigeria (PIN) is located in the Ajegunle slum in Lagos, Nigeria. (Ironically, Ajegunle means “wealth resides here,” noted ‘Gbenga). PIN, launched by ‘Gbenga in 2007, aims to improve the livelihoods of disadvantaged Nigerian youth by equipping them with IT training and employment opportunities.

In PIN’s 2-1/2-month program in Ajegunle, young people from 15 to 28 learn how to use computers for economic empowerment. PIN works to improve the odds of employment by finding internships and providing entrepreneurship training.

‘Gbenga, full of energy and quick to smile, related an anecdote about how he became interested in computers. His high school kept two computers hidden away in a special room. He saw others go in and out of the room, but when he tried to go in, he was turned away and told he couldn’t use them because he might cause damage. At that moment “I decided to learn about PCs and teach others,” he said. ‘Gbenga graduated with a degree in electrical engineering. After working for a private company in Nigeria and volunteering teaching youth on the weekends, ‘Gbenga launched PIN in 2007 and serves as executive director. He was an Ashoka Fellow in 2009 and was one of the 19 social entrepreneurs at the 2010 Global Social Benefit Incubator, a program of Santa Clara University’s Center for Science, Technology, and Society.

In addition to the Ajegunle project, PIN is involved in a number of interesting initiatives including holding IT training workshops around the country, petitioning the National Assembly for cybercrimes legislation, and working with Microsoft Nigeria on teacher training.  ‘Gbenga summarized his biggest challenges as “scaling, staffing, and finding partnering organizations for local internships.”

Charles and ‘Gbenga reflect the diverse organizations of the 2011 Cordes Fellows. Fellows have leadership roles at an array of organizations, ranging from established to new social enterprises, remote rural regions to urban slums, and from agriculture to computing. Full disclosure: I was one of the jurors for this year’s fellowship program. Having the chance to meet many of them this week has been inspiring. By all indications, the Fellows I have spoken with met the criteria for applicants and delegates: to be “catalytic leaders who by their actions and accomplishments evidence pragmatic vision, passionate tenacity, multisectoral thinking, adaptive leadership skills, nonideological activism, and a strong ethical grounding.” It’s impossible not to feel hopeful about social change after spending time with these Fellows.

Read a related post, “Stone Soup and an Impoverished Mexican Village.”

AID for Africa is a partnership of 80 nonprofits addressing a wide range of issues in sub-Saharan Africa.  All of the member organizations are based in Africa, but they must be registered in the U.S. To become a member, the organizations must also meet specific tests of governance, programmatic impact, and fiscal accountability—including commissioning an annual audit. Barbara explained to me how this alliance has allowed the nonprofits to use a powerful US funding opportunity: the U.S. government’s Combined Federal Campaign (CFC). The CFC is the federal government’s annual workplace charity campaign, a program that was established by President John Kennedy in 1961.

The federal government has about four million employees, said Barbara, and over one million employees use payroll deductions for charitable giving. They choose from about 4,000 organizations, and last year gave close to $300 million. AID for Africa is the only network of African nonprofits that are part of the CFC, according to Barbara. The financial benefit of being part of the CFC is a powerful draw for members, who also benefit from being grouped together on the AID for Africa website with its online donation facility. AID for Africa takes a small percentage of the donations, making the organization financially sustainable. Barbara also works with AID for Africa members to help them find ways to collaborate and draw on each others’ strengths.

AID for Africa’s model seems like a smart way to bring nonprofits together where they can leverage their combined presence. What are some other examples of nonprofits that pull groups of nonprofits together in innovative ways?

Read a related post, “What Are You Doing on World Poverty Eradication Day?.”

Working together to tackle poverty issues is just what is going on this week at the Opportunity Collaboration, which is where I am today.  About 300 social entrepreneurs, nonprofit executives, foundation leaders, and social impact investors converged last night in the tropical town of Ixtapa, Mexico, for a full four days of networking, collaborating, and strategizing on global poverty issues.  Jonathan Lewis founded this unusual gathering three years ago to take place annually the week of World Poverty Eradication Day.  (Lewis, who is the founder and board chair of Microcredit Enterprises, also writes for SSIR.)

One of the unusual aspects of this gathering is the high ratio of funders to social entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders, which OC CEO Topher Wilkins estimates to be 1 to 3.  Another is the generosity of Ron Cordes, cofounder of the Cordes Family Foundation, who funds the Cordes Fellowship.  This year a record 63 Cordes Fellows, representing 33 countries, were selected.  The purpose of the fellowship program is to (a) open doors, minds and networks for emerging social entrepreneurs and nonprofit executives (b) enrich the Opportunity Collaboration with new, emerging leaders and (c) infuse the collaborative discussions with a diversity of perspectives.

In casual conversations yesterday evening, again and again attendees who attended previous years told me about partnerships that had happened because of the OC.  Funders found ventures to support or invest in, and social enterprises were able to find new funders and partners.  Over the coming week, I plan to blog about social enterprises I learn about here and about funders’ thinking on how to increase their impact on global poverty alleviation.

With 100,000 Homes, any organization can enroll its community in the campaign, as long as it is committed to the shared aim of finding and housing the most vulnerable homeless people in their community. We recruit and work closely with leaders from all four sectors—nonprofits, local government, business, and philanthropy.

We have been curious, though, about the extent to which having representation on the local 100,000 Homes Campaign impacts the results that the team is able to achieve. Recently, our partners at the National Alliance to End Homelessness worked with us to create a survey of 100,000 Homes Campaign teams. We wanted to find out which sector led each local team and which sectors comprised them, as well as the extent to which they worked effectively with local Veterans Affairs offices and local public housing authorities (two tremendous sources of housing supply).

Nineteen out of ninety-five communities (20 percent) responded to the survey. We screened out communities that had not yet completed their “Registry Week”, in which volunteers canvass the streets for three mornings to create a by-name list of everyone experiencing homelessness and to administer a survey (called the Vulnerability Index) to determine the fragility of their health.

Of the remaining twelve communities, we created a “collective impact score,” which gives one point for each of the following sectors represented on their campaign leadership team: Veterans Administration, public housing authority, local government, Continuum of Care (a coordinating body for federal homeless grant applications), Business Improvement District, nonprofits, and philanthropists. A total of 7 points is possible on the collective impact score. We weighted it to allow additional points for inclusion of the Veterans Administration and public housing authority, because we believe that their participation is critical to large-scale systems change in solving chronic homelessness. We then compared the collective impact score to the communities’ monthly housing placement rate—that is, the average number of vulnerable people they move into permanent housing each month.

The chart below demonstrates a modest positive correlation between the collective impact score and the community’s housing placement rate.

Note that no communities with a collective impact score below 4 had a placement rate above the average of 5 vulnerable people per month; however, there were two outlier communities with more than 4 sectors on their local campaign team that were under-achieving in terms of housing placement and impact. One of those communities is early in their involvement in the 100,000 Homes Campaign and currently in the process of significant community dialogue toward an even deeper collective impact approach. The other community is struggling with securing full alignment with their nonprofit partners. Clearly there are factors beyond simply having the right sectors at the table for creating significant impact in ending homelessness; however, this early look at the data indicates that if a community wants to have the best chance at truly achieving something breathtaking, getting the right sectors to the table and actively engaged is a great place to start.

The problem with traditional charity is not only that it must overcome the known problems—administrative overhead, corruption, waste—but that it is premised on a zero-sum redistribution, with little or no thought to the power of incentives or the necessity of self sufficiency. From my experiences, I have seen that even the most destitute person, once he receives enough food for the next week, often takes no further action for the remainder of the week. Needless to say, many recipients have become trained to anticipate handouts.

With this problem in mind, I have sought out solutions with the most asymmetrical, multi-pronged impact. I have created an innovation prize, the K Prize, that is based on the power of incentives and addresses the persistence of global poverty. It is a prize for innovators in the burgeoning field of 3D printing for personal manufacturing.

Why 3D printing for personal manufacturing? An industrial infrastructure that can provide the products and employment needed to elevate average people in emerging economies to an intermediate level of human development can take decades to build. With the success of China in assimilating so much of the global economy’s low-cost manufacturing output, many of the world’s poorest nations have no opportunity to construct and secure their own manufacturing sector. Hence, this stage of industrial development has become a chasm that many nations are finding difficult to cross.

But if manufacturing itself can be brought to the scale that cottage industries operate in, then the scale of Chinese mass manufacturing is no longer a requirement to be cost competitive. A technology that removes the fixed costs and volume necessities associated with manufacturing can reduce the barriers to entry for the manufacturing of many commodity goods, creating a “long tail” effect.

The technology to print solid objects (much like an inkjet printer, except that thousands of layers are successively printed until the object is complete) is becoming reliable and affordable. The Economist featured the technology in its Feb. 10, 2011 cover story, stating: “The industrial revolution of the late 18th century made possible the mass production of goods, thereby creating economies of scale which changed the economy—and society—in ways that nobody could have imagined at the time. Now a new manufacturing technology has emerged which does the opposite. Three-dimensional printing makes it as inexpensive to create single items as it is to produce thousands and thus undermines economies of scale. It may have as profound an impact on the world as the coming of the factory did.”

Even more ambitious, a community of inventors has been working on producing a 3D printer that prints copies of its own parts—i.e., a self-replicating printer. This initiative is known as the RepRap project, and has an open-source policy. Many of these inventors pursue the project as a hobby, and thus hesitate to spend a few hundred dollars that might advance the project. A prize could cause team formation and resource pooling, accelerating the technology. Furthermore, the material used in the 3D printing process under RepRap need not be expensive; it can consist of some of the plastics causing environmental problems. Twenty seven million tons of plastic waste produced each year can be redeployed toward the productive use of personal manufacturing.

Like the editors of The Economist and increasingly many others, I believe that this technology could cause a massive paradigm shift in how low-cost manufacturing is done. A machine that could print just about any basic solid object of daily utility, and even print electrical circuits, is useful enough. If the same machine also could print 90 percent of the parts needed to build a copy of itself, then mass distribution of this “personal manufacturing” machine would be extremely efficient.

The K Prize for Personal Manufacturing will be awarded to the innovator who can produce a self-replicating 3D printer. The prize seeks to encourage collaboration and sharing among participants in the RepRap project. The prize of up to $100,000 will consist of an interim prize of $20,000 awarded at the end of 2012, and a grand prize of $80,000 awarded at the end of 2015. Please visit kprize.wordpress.com for details. I intend to demonstrate that with the right vision and incentives, a great deal can be accomplished to reduce poverty and spark an innovation economy in the developing world.

But a venture based in Mumbai has broken the ice: Mirakle Couriers offers standard courier services and employs only deaf adults. Its entire staff—including the couriers themselves—suffer from extreme hearing loss. Twenty workers manage data entry, package tracking and scanning, and other branch operations. The other 44 staff members navigate the complex landscape of Mumbai to deliver packages.

The company offers a sign language program to all new employees, and everything from pick-up to delivery is carefully planned at the firm’s branches in sign language. Unlike other courier services in India, couriers communicate with customers via text message rather than by phone, and since they aren’t allowed to drive, they must use public transportation for delivery. The couriers must also receive training on how to deal with the social stigma of deafness.

The most unique thing about Mirakle is that it believes in a model of development through enterprise and not charity giving. These employees gain confidence and financial independence that would be otherwise unavailable to them—they are able to support their families rather than having to be helplessly dependent on them.

Founder Dhruv Lakra was motivated to start Mirakle after meeting a deaf person on the bus. “I thought, why should people with this disability be confined to doing odd jobs?” he says, “Mirakle Couriers was born out of my desire to help the deaf find a path to a dignified life. And being a courier is a job that requires minimal interaction, so this was the best idea I could think of.”

Mirakle Couriers has won various awards, including the Hellen Keller Award in 2009 and the National Award for the Empowerment of People With Disabilities in 2010, handed over by the President of India.

This spring, I met Rye Barcott on a book tour for his memoir It Happened on the Way to War: A Marine’s Path to Peace, and learned about Carolina for Kibera (CFK). Celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, CFK’s mission is to develop local leaders,
catalyze positive change, and alleviate poverty in Kibera. One of CFK’s core beliefs is that community problems require local solutions run by local leaders.

In 2000, as a 20-year-old, Rye was drawn to learn more about ethnic violence and spent a summer in a 10-by-10-foot shack in Kibera. While there, he met a nurse, Tabitha Festo, and a community organizer, Salim Mohamed, both of whom had powerful visions of how they could effect change in Kibera. Together, the three of them cofounded CFK with the broad goal of developing a new generation of leaders. The on-the-ground work in Kibera fell under the leadership of Tabitha and Salim. Rye worked from afar while he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (CFK is a program of the Center for Global Initiatives at UNC). He continued to participate from afar while he served as a Marine in Iraq, Bosnia, and the Horn of Africa, and earned a master’s in business and public administration from Harvard.

Although Rye’s personal story is extraordinary, what attracted me most to CFK was its commitment to participatory development—the local community appears to have been the focal point of all that CFK has done from its founding to today, and that is apparent in its mission and operations. I believe, as many do, that one of the reasons so many efforts in global poverty alleviation have failed is that change hasn’t come from the community. CFK seems to walk the talk, and to put the community front and center in all things.

CFK’s entire staff in Kibera is Kenyan—many are from Kibera—and CFK’s office is in Kibera. The only full-time staff person in the US is Executive Director Leann Bankoski, who put me in touch with George Kogolla, the executive director in Kenya. George invited me to come to CFK’s office in Kibera when I visited Nairobi this summer.

After the adventure of finding CFK’s walled white and blue cement office (“drive to the Olympic Estate, it’s close to Chief Camp, park, and just ask someone to point you to CFK, everyone knows where it is”), my companions and I wedged ourselves into George’s back office. His office is attached to the small main room of the building, which was crowded with tables and computers where five staff members worked busily. Others bustled in and out.

George, soft-spoken and intent, spent a generous 90 minutes with us, describing CFK’s challenges and local orientation. CFK continues to grow its original initiatives (first two below) and has added new programs:
• The sports association teaches healthy life choices and promotes peace across gender and ethnic divides in Kibera. Over 5,000 children participate in the annual soccer tournament each year. (Chasing the Mad Lion is an upcoming documentary on the tournament.)
• The Tabitha Clinic is a community-based medical clinic and one of the few permanent structures in Kibera. More than 40,000 patients visit the new three-story clinic every year.
• Other programs for Kibera youth focus on reproductive health and women’s rights for 11- to 18-year-old girls; empower youth to talk about sex, HIV/AIDS, and reproductive health; and offer financial assistance to attend school. (Fifty percent of Kibera residents are under the age of 15.)

On one hand, the issues George discussed were unique to CFK; on the other, they seemed emblematic of executive directors and social entrepreneurs everywhere. “We are moving from a ‘doing’ to an ‘impact’ organization,” he told me firmly. He struggled to find local leaders. He was looking for a Kenyan to help with a strategic plan for Trash Not Cash, a community-managed solid waste management and recycling program that was intended to be a profit-driven social business. He was trying to create an effective program to develop local social entrepreneurs, who, he said, often didn’t understand the microlending concept. He had trouble transitioning local volunteers who received small stipends to full-time employment outside of CFK. He also spoke about fundraising hurdles and the challenge of increasing giving from Kenya.

While managing all these activities and many more, he hosts college student groups and western visitors like me. As we left the office to walk to the clinic, I met students and a professor from the UNC School of Social Work, who were conducting an intense few weeks of health research—just one of many university groups that have worked with CFK, including MIT and Stanford.

Woven through our conversation was the theme of community, which was certainly underscored by the office’s location. I can’t imagine a better place for an organization that “recognizes the youth of Kibera as resilient, wise, innovative, and eager to lift their community above the poverty and violence that plagues it.” CFK’s community focus promises to effect change that will stick. Seeing CFK in action gave me a much richer understanding of what community engagement really means.

Ms. Ridley joined the Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2006 as publishing director. Previously she was group president at CMP Media, where she ran a division of technology publications, events, and websites. Ridley is also founder and board chair of Friends of Timboni Feeder School, a nonprofit that supports a K-5 school in Kenya. She holds a B.A. in political science from the University of Connecticut and a Masters in International Management from the Thunderbird School of Global Management.

The mission of both of these nonprofits is to raise the most economically deprived families out of poverty within three years, preferably through environmentally sustainable means.

The approach is to provide families with interest-free loans that they repay within five months. Each loan comes with an important support package: a mix of education, advice, and problem-solving tools. Taken together, these efforts produce positive results, and in most cases, go a long way toward ensuring that loans are paid back. Once a loan is repaid, the family is eligible for another. The beauty of this system is that because the loans are short-term, families can start to see the benefits of the program very early on. This is inspiring and keeps the momentum going.

The main strategy is to create alternate sources of income. For example, if the first loan was given to raise chickens, the TC or AD staff might next suggest the family start growing vegetables using a “net house” that reduces the need for expensive chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

The staff also encourages farmers to adopt environmentally friendly practices, such as using biogas digester systems (fueled by animal waste) for cooking instead of chopping down trees for wood. Both TC and AD use a cash reward system as an incentive for this.

To track impact, a notebook is created for each family. It contains their financial information and is used to record loans and repayments. Each year, the family’s income is noted to see whether the support system is helping. If it isn’t, the staff meets to figure out how best to proceed.

These organizations also work very closely with local authorities (they have little choice, given the nature of the political regime). The staff contacts local authorities to determine which families are below the poverty line. 

Since TC and AD’s priority is education, they will first approach families with children who are not attending school. The authorities also provide enforcement when people are slow or delinquent in their loan repayments.

So, could this sort of model be replicated in other countries? Although tailored to the Vietnamese political and social reality, I feel TC and AD’s model of helping people rise out of poverty has some elements that could work elsewhere.

For example, in Nicaragua, where I spent some time in February, there didn’t seem to be any authority aware of the number of people living in poverty; there was no one keeping track of which families were falling through the cracks. It might be possible to go through various records (medical, school) and piece together that information, but because most rural communities in Nicaragua lack access to health services, such records might not exist. How would one systematically determine which families to help first, and who would enforce authority if necessary? Clearly, there is a cultural difference that might prohibit the same model being used here. However, once a culturally appropriate program was in place, it’s certainly possible to track progress in a notebook.

In Indonesia, which I visited as part of my trip to Asia, it seemed like the practice of tracking progress was seldom exercised. Measuring the impact of programs over time was supported more by anecdotal evidence than hard evidence. The same was true in Cambodia, which I also visited during this trip.

However, the notebook method used by TC and AD could be ideal in both of these countries and in others, as it is cheap, easy to use, and keeps all the records in one location. The loan system with extra support could work too.

These days, more donors and granting institutions want to know the impact of their donations. They often ask those they fund to measure and report results. There are many organizations in the developing world that don’t have the know-how to track their impact so that they can evaluate whether their goals are worth pursuing or if their method is successful. I believe the model used by Thien Chi and Anh Duong is simple enough to adapt to various situations and to other regions.

Marc Henrich is founder and executive director of Ecodana, a nonprofit that supports green solutions to poverty issues in developing countries. He is also working on a new venture that will market and distribute solar lamps in Central America.

This should not come at a surprise, but when it comes to identifying the solution, the jury is still out.

One of the pitfalls in education reform to date is the belief in a one-size-fits-all solution, which has been proven untrue time and again. This is no less true in India, where I write from today. The country’s urban capitals prescribe education policy on the whole, while the majority of citizens (70 percent, or approximately 830 million) reside in rural areas. Student persistence is low (only one-third complete high school) and workforce preparedness is inadequate (24 million unemployed).

The million-dollar question is how do we make education engaging and relevant at scale—a colossal challenge with the realities of poverty, politics, illiteracy, teacher absenteeism, gender inequality, and undeveloped infrastructure that results in frequent power outages and flooded roads during monsoons.

This past week, I was on my third school visit with Lend-A-Hand India (LAHI), a social enterprise committed to transforming rural education (in its first 5 years it has partnered with 60-plus schools across 3 states; more here). While this trip focused on installing corporate-donated computers at Mangaon School in rural Maharashtra, I was more interested in observing the implementation of the Introduction to Basic Technology (IBT) program. This program is the foundation of LAHI’s reform strategy, and it’s gaining momentum—the Maharashtra government has acknowledged it as an integral part of rural high school curriculum. This recognition has resulted from LAHI’s efforts to scale the program and advocacy by the IBT’s curriculum innovator, Vigyan Ashram.

Mangaon School is unique as a purely ashram school serving tribal, nomadic communities of rural Maharashtra. The 400-plus students’ families income levels are extremely low (on average, between 60-100 rupees, or US $1-2, per day), with access only to seasonal jobs such as sugarcane harvesting or bricklaying. Due to these communities’ transient nature, education typically has not been feasible nor prioritized, regardless of quality. On the contrary, child labor is the norm.

What I saw, heard, and experienced at the Mangaon School was inspiring, even without the added context of the students’ impoverished families and limited futures. Students were constructing greenhouses, wiring solar-powered LED lights, building benches and tables, drawing engineering plans, mass-producing chikki sweets, and tending their worm-fed compost that they package and sell in the village—all as part of the IBT curriculum. And they were into it. While the agriculture instructor looked on, a class of 10th graders worked together to plant crops that help feed fellow students.

The IBT program at Mangaon School (and each IBT partner school) recruits local entrepreneurs to teach the vocational curriculum empowering students to develop new innovations that benefit their local economy. I learned that their solar-powered, rechargeable lights were big sellers at the local market, where villagers typically endure daily power outages.

Headmaster Ankush Kale explained that, prior to IBT program integration into the curriculum, the school ran 1st-7th grade only. At the end of 7th grade, children would return to their families and become laborers—few other options existed, and advanced education was rare, as families were eager to gain another source of income.

When the IBT program came to Mangaon 4 years ago, the school started offering education through 10th grade, with positive results. Two classes, totaling 70 students, have graduated thus far. Of these 70 graduates, 100 percent passed the 10th-grade board examinations, and 97 percent are furthering their education at technical, vocational, or other diploma-granting institutions. This is a great achievement regardless, but taking into account the background of these children, the results are phenomenal. As Mr. Kale explained, “When we find these kids, they don’t even have clothes on their back. Now, they are thinking about starting their own businesses.”

This was not just another attempt at fixing rote learning—it was a well-executed strategy for long-term transformation. These graduates are pioneers of their communities and are motivated and armed to make something out of their lives. Through IBT and the Mangaon School, they have been propelled into the next level of educational and career advancement, and have developed skills along the way that grant them access to employment opportunities they would not have had otherwise. In addition, students have made other softer-but-significant achievements, including finding their voice, gaining confidence, defining their interests, and connecting with other education-bound peers. Before we departed that afternoon, a class of students stood proudly in front of us, exclaiming their future aspirations: “Teacher!” “Nurse!” “Electrician!” “Architect!” These students have built the courage to step out from the cycles of hardship that their ancestors have endured to make a livelihood for themselves, and undoubtedly, their future generations will be transformed because of it.