Myself and one other fellow getting into the social enterprise mentality at one of our early brainstorming sessions!

Lesson one: What are we doing here?

I have been in India for a week and a half now and am getting fairly well settled.  The first week of training has involved a lot of meeting new people, taking in information on social enterprise and affordable private schools and a huge amount of life sorting.  All of the IDEX fellows were fortunate enough to be allocated apartments, which we have spent our free time decking out with furniture, fridges, washing machines and home broadband.  We have also been getting together our mobile phones and some Indian attire acceptable for work. The process of arranging many of these things is not like in England. For one, every single person requires you provide passport photocopies and an electricity bill for everything.  Not too easy when you’re trying to set up the electrics. And when people say they are going to deliver the furniture at 11am, they actually mean 8pm. And they’ll only bring half of it. The rest comes tomorrow. Or maybe the next day. But it’s been good fun and it’s certainly a bonding experience between myself and my four other flatmates.

There are 36 IDEX fellows in total working out in Hyderabad. 32 are from the USA, 3 are from India, and 1 (myself) is from the UK. We are being team led by one of the last year’s fellows who is hugely knowledgeable about the task in hand and has a lot of patience having lived in India for all of last year.  Despite her never-ending list of jobs (on top of managing and training us she has also started her own social enterprise over here with two other fellows from last year), she always has a big smile on her face. Although this year’s fellows all have a pretty diverse set of backgrounds and varied academic focuses, including business, international relations and education, we all share an interest in and belief in the value of social enterprise: economic and social development through business models and innovation.

Training consists of a combination of group teambuilding activities, information on affordable private schools and social enterprise and brainstorming about how we are going to be spending the next nine months. We begin each day at 8am with an hour of yoga (maintaining a calm disposition being fundamental to success over here) and work through until around 5pm, digesting lots of important information vital to the success of the coming year. We then have reading to do in the evening and research on local enterprises. Our job this year will predominantly be to work one-on-one with the owner of our allocated school to help them improve the quality of the service they provide: educating the poor. We shall spend the first month putting together a case study of the school itself to find out which areas are doing well and which need more support. We will be considering everything from teaching quality to school facilities to extra-curriculars to financials. Most of the schools are likely to be doing very well in certain areas but lacking in others.  Once the school case study is compiled we will be working with the owners to construct a school-specific action plan geared towards all areas that need improvement and then putting that plan into practice. Last year’s fellows helped develop shared library networks, computer lab programs, teacher training, extra-curricular clubs, creative learning programs and career guidance counselling systems. They also helped the schools apply for local loans for building projects etc.

Group training

One key warning to us has been to avoid implementing “fluffy” innovations. We need to be putting into practice sustainable models for change in schools that can be reused after our departure.  It is no help to a school owner if we come and teach one academic year’s worth of English and then leave.  Far more helpful is to give teachers guidance in their English teaching techniques and transfer skills which they can then continue to use in the coming years and train new teachers in themselves.

Alongside our in-school work, the IDEX fellows will also be meeting together in working groups specifically focused towards certain areas that might need improvement, brainstorming ideas for innovations and business plans that all schools might adopt.  For example one group will be looking specifically at how information technology might be used in schools. They will cover everything from getting computer systems in to schools in the first place to how school owners and teachers can best utilise technology. This group will consist of those in the IDEX team who have a particular background experience in computing and so will be able to give other fellows not so experienced in this field advice, strategies and business plans that they can pass on to their school owners. In this way knowledge is shared.  Other working groups might include those interested in helping career development, financial aids or arts projects. 

So week one has been a lot to take on board. New home, new friends, new job, new lifestyle. But training has also made me very optimistic about what I hopefully have to offer here and even more about the wealth of knowledge I am about to acquire. One key thing I have learnt so far is that social enterprise is about playing to people’s strengths and sharing knowledge and skills. Here in Hyderabad I am surrounded by extremely bright entrepreneurial individuals, so despite the fact that we don’t have gas in our flats and our toilets don’t flush, I am feeling inspired and excited by what can be learnt and achieved in the coming year.

Affordable Private Schools: everyone's a winner

Three days until departure. Lots of life juggling going on what with trying to write a dissertation, moving home from university, packing for ten months abroad and saying all my goodbyes. There is so much to think about when going to somewhere like India: flights, visa, insurance, bank account, phone account, medical kit, vaccinations, mosquito net, plug adapters... The to do (and to get) list is endless, and ticking things off takes time. 12,000 words on moral particularism and human rights has also been a somewhat hefty addition to my workload. Currently, my days are spent in the library; evenings packing, unpacking and repacking bags at home; nights out with friends or eating with the family. Sometime I get some sleep in too.  And I’m trying to learn Hindi. I can do 12 letters of the alphabet so far.

To remind myself of why all this craziness will be worth it, I have been reading ‘A Beautiful Tree’ by Professor James Tooley, which is an account of his research into Affordable Private Schools that has inspired much of the work IDEX sets out to undergo in Hyderabad.

Tooley’s book recounts ten years of his own research into Affordable Private Schools (APS): schools privately owned, set up by local entrepreneurs, located in the poorest areas of low-economy nations, and created to educate children from very poor families.  These schools are not well documented in the Western world and indeed Tooley himself stumbled upon them by accident whilst carrying out a separate research project. His story begins in the slums Hyderabad where he came across the surprising discovery that even in the poorest areas, many very poor families were choosing to pay for their children to be educated at one of tiny independently owned schools dotted on every street corner of the slums, rather than at the government schools where teaching, uniform and daily lunch is all free. 

The findings meant two things: the teaching in the APS was of a significantly higher standard to that in government schools, and the parents of children, even in the poorest areas, value education so much that they are willing to pay for this difference. 

Tooley argues that these schools are the way forward for the poor. They cost around US$10 per child per year, which is just about affordable for the average cycle rickshaw driver. Some children – orphans, or those from the very poorest families – attend for free, subsidised by the fees of others. The school owners make a small profit, the teachers are paid small, but sufficient, wages and the kids receive a good quality of education. These schools are businesses constructed for social means, the school owners genuinely wanting to provide a good service. This is social enterprise at its finest.

Each of the IDEX fellows will be assigned one of these schools to work with. Mine is called Alliance International. This is all I’ll know about it before I arrive since none of these schools, being very small (often just rooms in the houses of the owners), have websites.  Our job is to work with school owners to help bring new ideas and innovations to improve the running of their schools from experiences of our own education and market based strategies we will be learning in our intro weeks. These schools still have very few resources so we have to be innovative with what there is to work with. We will be looking at everything from school dinner plans to discipline strategies to sports clubs. I’m hoping to start a CV clinic to help children think about their future life plans beyond school.

The APS system has not been without criticism. Kevin Watkins, in a paper responding to Tooley, argues that development agencies should be concerned with improving free education for the poor and not improving the APS leading to a further subdivision of class in poor countries. I am aware that this might be a legitimate claim, however, I have a feeling Watkins may have somewhat missed understanding why it is that the APS have been such a success. Development requires that everyone involved in any project have a motivation to put in the effort to reach goals. In societies where corruption and bribery are still widespread, it is easy for things to fall through the loop and for some people to take advantage. In the APS, owners are motivated to keep their standards high as this is the only way to ensure fee paying children will attend; teachers in these schools will thus be motivated to teach well, not wanting to risk dismissal by the owners; families of poor children will be motivated to send their children to these schools because they will be aware of the significant difference in educational quality their children will be receiving. Everyone has a stake in maintaining the success of the business. And everyone is held accountable.

I shall be very interested to see for myself at Alliance International whether Tooley’s happy picture of bottom-up small-scale development is as he claims. I very much hope it is.


For more on Affordable Private Schools please look at the website for Gray Matters Capital which is the organisation sponsoring the IDEX fellows in India http://www.graymatterscap.com/affordable-private-school-initiative