For A Better World

In Delhi, Amazon India has collaborated with Katha, a well-known NGO, for one of its kind 300M Citizen Challenge, which can be accessed on katha.org. There are 300 million children in school, out of which 150 million are in pre-primary and primary classes. Almost 50 per cent children can’t read at the grade level. “Looking at the issue of children, aged between 5-10, who are unable to read well, Katha felt the need of developing a platform of inclusive learning spaces where we could create the story pedagogy through our colourful, illustrated books, and develop small courses,” says Parvinder Kaur, Executive Director, Katha. “We even train facilitators on how to use the portal, both online and offline.” The portal is a multi-language activity story-based learning platform. The challenge is designed for scale.

Through its many partner agencies and NGOs, Katha reaches out to more and more children. Well-known NGOs such as Salaam Balak Trust (SBT) and Society for Promotion of Youth and Masses (SPYM) have access to the teaching and learning modules of the portal.

Children can listen to stories, watch the animation, have fun learning with dance, counsellors also provide skill development for holistic and all-around development. "Children here need love and care. Many are in their adolescence and often ask about their anatomy or sometimes about geography, as they haven't seen the outside world. Digital learning is a better way to answer their queries as it is colourful, musical and makes for easy learning,” says a senior counsellor at SBT, New Delhi.

SPYM has been provided with e-learning gadgets to run its ‘Bhiksha Nahin Shiksha’ project in the government-run shelters for the homeless. Facilitators like Nasreen, who teach homeless children, rag pickers, street children, find this an apt way for children to gain knowledge. “Once, the parents leave for work, these children have no other engagement at these night shelters. Earlier, they used to help their parents with rag picking work, or even used to beg at the traffic signals but with this fun way of reading and learning, we have seen the numbers increasing at this centre. Also, they look forward to touching the gadgets, use colourful crayons for pictorial learning,” she adds.

Young Anjali is among those who stay at this shelter. “I like the musical games, the storytelling and colouring with these crayons. I don’t need to return this set so I am happy as I can draw something on the walls here after my class,” she smiles.

Through Katha, Amazon India has also provided smart devices such as Kindle and Alexa for seamless online education. Young Anita is happy as she browses for stories on her Kindle at Katha Lab School, New Delhi. “It is a convenient way of reading and I just need to click on the word to know the meaning.”

“For teachers, especially from the primary wing, Alexa is the best gadget for the class. It recognises animal names and tells the sounds they make,” says a primary wing teacher.

Not only are children from underserved communities benefiting, differently abled ones also have access to education now. For this Amazon India partnered with CBR NETWORK, a community-based rehabilitation charitable trust, in Bengaluru. They established a village resource centre for inclusive education at Karlamangala village, Ramnagar district, Bengaluru. “We have adapted the learning station to Indian conditions to ensure the training for assistive technology will enable children who are differently abled,” says Dr Indumathi Rao, Regional Adviser, CBR Network. This multi-utility learning station for inclusive schools is based on ‘The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act’, National Education Policy 2020, and Sustainable Development Goal 4 that focuses on the need to enhance the quality of learning.

The centre is equipped with Alexa, laptops, books, teaching and learning material and indigenous games and about 500 children can benefit from the resource centre every year. At the resource centre there is a mix of rural children, with some who are differently abled. Pick-up cards based on learning outcomes are placed at the learning centre. The children ask Alexa first, Google next and finally the teacher, and this approach has come in handy to reinforce several concepts. This has also helped children pick up English, build on vocabulary and develop sensitivity towards peers. To limit screen time, the children spend an hour in the facility and then play and listen to stories from an older villager. Nandini, a class VIII student who aspires to be a doctor, says, “I have learned a lot about grammar and can also use a computer after coming here.” Likewise, Tirumalesh Gowda, a class VII student, who wants to be a policeman, says, “We use Alexa to ask our questions, and also improve our language skills. Alexa also tells us jokes.” Hamsa, a teacher from a neighbouring village, says, “It is great to see how children are able to expand their thinking capabilities and improve English using the laptops and Alexa.”

In order to empower parents and, especially, mothers of differently abled children, the team at CBR NETWORK developed an Indianised, rural version of Portage, that is available in different languages. At the Srushti Montessori House of Children, in Jayanagar, Bengaluru, a physical learning centre, a mixed group of children is taught to improve motor skills while they learn in an inclusive atmosphere. The concept is simple: whatever a school can do, a home can do better. Vineeth Nagarju, Founder, mSpark App says, “We work in collaboration with CBR NETWORK and use the Portage to provide developmental solutions to children with special needs. We have established a specific structure to educate and train parents to help their children. An individualised education plan is drawn up for each child and a set of weekly activities are assigned to the child as part of his/her curriculum.”

Centre Head Kalpana Prasad adds, “We imbibe Portage and merge it with Montessori as the activities go hand-in-hand and it has worked very well over the last 13 years. At least 25 children have been able to go to mainstream schools over these years.”

Suma Sastry, a trainer, and special educator, says, “We have seen significant improvement in children as they pick up the required skill levels.”

At Banashankari in Bengaluru, the International Resource Centre on Inclusive Education (IRIEC), a physical resource centre developed by CBR, has books, videos, virtual classroom lectures, FAQ on disability, curriculum for training personnel for CBR, global and national policies, assistive devices models and facilities for researchers, media, universities and schools to use the library. “We had a shortage of information on disabling conditions and this section is useful for parents, anganwadi workers and teachers as well as healthcare personnel. Within IRIEC, ASK T.I.N.A. is a section where we work towards inclusion and understand disability rights and provisions and rights of persons with disabilities. V.E.D.A TALKS are virtual talks on education, usually held monthly and we have a special workshop to enable parents and teachers. The digital library has over 5,000 books and is a single window for accessing information. IRIEC will be made available in more Indian languages. We also have a feature called Atmanirbhar Samaj Nirman to connect trained people with future employers, post their resumes, and schools and hospitals post their requirements. IRIEC has a huge training portal where people can access training programmes online. This is a digital revolution in the field of disability,” concludes Dr Rao.

The multi-utility learning station concept has been well received by the Department of Education, Karnataka, and has been included as one of the modules in training 25,000 teachers. The Department of Education also has plans to establish 74 resource centres in different districts in Karnataka.

What has been the response to your projects?
We believe that the impact goes beyond numbers. We have detailed metrics on how we measure the impact of the interventions, not just the reach of the intervention. For the ‘Amazon Future Engineer’ programme, we measure the student’s intent to take up computer science and the amount of content they have consumed. We check how their learning outcomes changed; how many teachers have been enabled. We do both quantitative and qualitative measurement of our work. Only for Covid-relief, we did measure the number of devices given to the hospitals and called many hospitals to ask about the usage and adoption.

Besides the core team, are the employees of Amazon also involved in any way with the projects such as volunteering and mentoring?
We have a couple of volunteering events which run through the year centrally. Class Chats is where certified volunteers give role model talks, where they talk about their journeys in the tech industry to children. We also run mentorship from high school to college students who are getting into work and help them navigate the transition of education to work. Amazon has hundreds of teams who run their own voluntary initiatives. We enable them through playbook kits, sometimes some small funding to help with their logistics.

What are the major challenges you face in executing the projects?
We are in the early stages in our philanthropy journey, so we are still learning. The focus is on bringing our unique experiences, technology, skills and logistics together. A key challenge is primarily the scale and complexity of India as the number of people we are trying to reach through our programmes is so huge. Our focus is on building scalability and identifying those scalable solutions becomes a challenge.

What other projects do you have in the pipeline?
We are looking to learn from our experiences to build scalable programmes with maximum impact. We will continue our disaster relief work. Another priority is volunteering and to build a culture of volunteering within Amazon. We have such a diverse base of employees who are our biggest strength and asset.