The end of the school day in Delhi - ten to a cycle rickshaw, not an uncommon sight.

5000 miles from home....

“Change in all things is sweet” – Aristotle

In less than a month from now I'll be sat on board flight 9W119, flicking through the in-flight magazine and nervously sipping on my final glass of wine for the next ten months praying my luggage makes it through the flight change. Destination: Hyderabad.

I'm currently a postgrad student in the UK finishing off my Master's course in political and moral philosophy at the University of Sheffield.  In July I shall be leaving my comfortable student life and entering the world of work as a social enterprise consultant working with affordable private schools in India.  I am one of 30 recent graduates selected by Oglethorpe University in the USA to be a member of their IDEX Fellowship, a professional development program set up in 2010 through a partnership between Oglethorpe University and Gray Matters Capital to train graduates in social enterprise business aimed at tackling poverty whilst being placed head on in the environment they are helping.  IDEX stands for IDeate. EXecute. Solve. It is about bringing together different kinds of people from different academic backgrounds to exchange ideas and innovation with local people to provide sustainable change in developing countries. Take a look at the IDEX website here: http://www.oglethorpe.edu/IDEX/Homepage.aspx

In a world where 3 billion people still live on less than $2.50 per day, an amount many westerners (myself included) wouldn’t think twice about spending on a cup of coffee, the gap between rich and poor is widening. It is sadly becoming more and more evident that aid, by way of monetary donation, cannot sufficiently narrow this gap and counteract global poverty.  For every $1 of foreign aid that a developing country receives, $25 is spent on debt repayment and so those who need money the most are, by and large, not the recipients of it.  Genuine poverty reduction requires something more. It requires setting up business ventures to give people long-term work and a sustainable income, rather than a gift of cash to buy things in the short-term.  Aid functions only to medicate the disease of poverty, whereas genuine change requires tackling the root of the problem itself by way of market-based strategies with social impact. This is the philosophy behind social enterprise and behind the work carried out by IDEX. 

Although social enterprise is currently developing all areas of public and private industry including power, technology, agriculture and health, education will be the primary focus of the IDEX work.  Since education is such a fundamental part of the path to economic and social development, much of the work I will be doing in the coming year will be in this sector. Us IDEX fellows will be working with affordable private schools (APS), which are schools serving the poorest families in Hyderabad, to help them develop and provide the best quality teaching for the less privileged members of Indian society. Although in India, literacy rates have dramatically risen over the last half-century, most children will still not see school beyond age 15 and literacy rates are still much lower for girls than boys.  Education in the first step towards developing the skills needed for self made enterprise and development.  The IDEX fellows are expected to be inspiring independent business ventures with the APS leaders to improve the running of these schools.

This is a big task to undertake and, in all honesty, an intimidating one.  I am the only fellow accepted who is neither American nor Indian and I feel very privileged to be invited to the cohort, but equally under pressure to perform and rise to the task in hand. We are expected to be working a 50-hour week for our Indian salaries and schools run from Monday to Saturday. In addition to this work, we shall be flying to conferences and seminars all over the country to learn about social enterprise in other fields and make connections with other entrepreneurs. Coming from the background of philosophy of human rights, I have an awful lot to learn about how social enterprise works in the real world; it’s a big step up from sitting in coffee shops in Sheffield browsing online philosophy journals.  But it’s an exciting change and one which I intend to put my all in to.  The chance to exchange knowledge and skills with local people and with my fellow IDEXers is something truly valuable to my own professional and personal development. Hopefully I will be part of something that will benefit the lives of others too.

This will be my third trip to India, but the first as a professional worker rather than a backpacker. To a certain extent I have ideas about how life in Hyderabad will be but there are many things I cannot know until I arrive.  One thing I know for sure though is that since coffee is now off the menu (I’m sorry, but Indian coffee just doesn’t cut it), I’ll be drinking the masala chai that Indians consume in ridiculous quantities to get me through the ten months. This will certainly be a time of chai and of change. I’ll be giving account of my experiences of work and play over the next few months.  Please do follow me on this blog to see how it goes.

For more facts and figures on global wealth disparity, check out: http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats