EAA and Infin8 host “Educating India through Dance” Bollywood Event in NYC!

infin8 - Dance Class Flyer

On Sunday, June 28th in New York City, Infin8, a South Asian dance company, will partner with Education Access for All to bring you a Bollywood – style dance class that mixes traditional Indian folk dances with hip-hop moves. The goal of this class is to use Infin8’s unique dance style to introduce you to elements of bollywood dance and bhangra through a fun, high-energy, calorie-burning dance routine.

Infin8 has partnered with Education Access for All to raise funds for education projects including school scholarships for rural children and arts education. We hope you can make it or donate to the event!

Date: Sunday June 28, 2009
TIme: 5:30pm – 7pm
Location: Battery Dance Studio, 380 Broadway (@ White St.), 5th Floor

The class is $15 if you reserve your spot in advance by visiting http://www.infin8dance.eventbrite.com, and $20 at the door. If you can’t attend, please consider donating to our mission through the site.

Education Access for All presents at Sankalp forum as finalist!

Imagine 100+ regional and international investors, business incubators, policy makers and corporates combined with hundreds of social entrepreneurs from sectors such as rural innovation, agriculture, healthcare, education, clean energy and more…

This was the Sankalp Forum hosted by Intellecap, which brought together social businesses and stakeholders sharing a common conviction that capital should be invested to create multiple bottom-line returns. One highlight of the forum was Vijay Mahajan, CEO of Basix, discussion of the word Sankalp which means “determination” and his story of starting his first social enterprise. Another highlight was the evening panel led by Venkat Krishnan, Founder of GiveIndia and Educational Initiatives, who discussed ”Impact Investing” as a way to transform capitalism and as a new and morally legitimate industry.

Ziqitza Education, which is the for-profit holding company while Education Access for All is our non-profit foundation arm, made the finalist round in the “Education for All” category in the “Emerging Growth” model. Other finalists in our category included Technable Solutions, which offers employment oriented vocational training; BookBox, which has created animated books to support emergent literacy and language skills; Forklift Academy of India, which runs a premier safety training company primarily on material handling equipments; and Joy of Learning, which develops children friendly books and runs activity centers that use play-based learning to teach elementary concepts to students. We were proud to be there in such company to discuss the opportunities and challenges facing the education market, the role of government, and different types of education business models and believe that only with collaboration across sectors, regions and models will we be able to make a dent in changing education here in India.

by Erica Dhawan

A Teacher’s Burden

“I spend half of the day collecting money and managing people, whereas I should be focused on teaching” said Jasveen Dhawan, my elder cousin and an 11th and 12th grade English teacher at Hindi Senior Secondary Government school in Sector 31 Chandigarh, India. Jasveen and I recently reunited after 7 years and I got a chance to get her personal view as a teacher in a Punjab Hindi medium government school.

In fact, Jasveen teaches 240 students each day, 4 sections of 60 students. Because there is only 1 clerk and 1 accountant at each government school, her workday consists of 50% teaching and 50% clerical work and management of funds. Each month, Jasveen must collect school fees from 60 of her students (which is 150 Rs per month per student). Sometimes the students don’t pay and she has to pay out of pocket and follow up persistently with these students to get paid back. Jasveen also manages all the school funds for her classes, including buying exam books and stationary from the market and collecting cycle, library, and deposit funds.

“Teachers become much less motivated if we are not focused on our job,” Jasveen said as she outlined her list of daily duties (not including teaching). She then emphasized that school teacher training which mostly consists of lesson plan guidance and new teaching aids was not applicable to the main issues in her classrooms: overcrowded classes and administrative burden.

Although we cannot immediately change the government system, Education Access for All, wants to help teachers like Jasveen manage her time and her classroom. Through Newton Management, our school management service, we want to build a network of schools where teachers can concentrate on their prime responsibility to teach in the classroom and have access to the innovative tools necessary to succeed.

by Erica Dhawan

Check out Crosswords

Check out Crosswords, an up market retail bookstore and common hang out spot for Bombay bookworms. I stopped in one Saturday and ended up spending almost half a day checking out the plethora of books, CDs, DVDs, let alone an entire education section.

The resources dedicated to education were massive, from the rows and rows of student guides, exam/college preparation books, and vocational training books to the e-learning section, ranging from online preschool games to exam/college preparation CDs in over 10 different brands and hundreds of subject levels.

My next thought: Where are the Crossword-like bookshops in small towns across India?

During our Rajasthan trip we recognized that very few schools were lucky to have these types of resources, let alone at the local bookstores. As we focus on both school management and e-learning we are thinking innovatively about how to distribute these products to small towns. While the channels are easy to find in urban areas, we are exploring and open to new ideas on how to distribute quality educational resources to small towns and rural areas.

Imagine when a 10th grader wants to buy extra study material on his biology paper. What if he could walk to his local grocery shop that he regularly visits to buy rice, soap and potatoes for his mother every other day and pick up a biology CD?

by Erica Dhawan