Visiting India December 5- January 13

I will be India from December 5th to January 13th and will be spending most of the time visiting projects and meeting with other leaders in rurual development and e- learning. I hope to be able to give first hand reporting from the site.

Jambu surprise site visit Photos- Feb 2008

Bhaskar, who is the coordinator for Asha Chennai was on a site visits trip (once again!) . This time he offered to visit Jambumadai village and do a surprise site visit to ensure everything is going fine.

You can see the photos here. A site visit report will follow. The purpose of these site visits is to check and ensure things are going as planned. It is also an opportunity to review and look into how we can share best practice learning from other projects to support Jambu and take home learning key points from Jambu that can be used in other projects.

The Jambu project is a pilot to try and bring the learning development programs of various organizations and take the best practices of them to build a program that is sustainable and can be implemented en mass.

Azim Premji foundation to provide e-learning tools

I have been amazed how there is a lot of noise about e-learning in India, but surprised, rather shocked that there are not many e-learning tools in the market place. So I got into this mission to track all available tools in the market place. I found Azim premji Foundation have done a great job and have e- learning CDs in many languages.
Even though they provide CDs only to the government to be used in government schools, they have been graceful to support us by sending 60 CDs for this project.

Our goal is to bring organizations who are working to empower India through education to support this village pilot and then take the best practices of all them to create one mass model that can be implemented in thousands of villages and should be self sustainable. It might be a lofty goal, but then I know from my own life, that if we dare not to dream, we should not expect change!

We are also now ready to implement the MS Swaminathan Research foundation component. things have changed since we started talkig in 2006, but their new Jamsetji Tata National Virtual Academy for Rural Prosperity (NVA) might be a better fit for this project. We can make our Admin a fellow at the institute and get him to spread the word in the district. the probables of doing things is plenty and all it takes is a desire to change. Our expectation is to start it in March and use this village as a pilot centre and then expand to many villages in the district.

Our third phase would include a partnership pilot with TCS on a different model on e- learning netowork for Computer aided learning (CAL's) .

So the model centre will consist of core Asha values and asha components with MSSRF/ISRO e-learning, Azim Premji Foundation software, combined to deliver better results. The question at play is will it work. Our feeling is it will, but we have no data(yet) to prove it.

You see, charitable work can be fun and learning!

Administrator hired.

After looking around for a while, we have finally been successful in hiring an administrator for this project. We have hired Senthil Kumar from National College to visit the village 2 times a week to manage and support the teacher we have hired. More details to follow.

Jambumadai computer centre opening

Project Objectives

What do we want to achieve:

-To bring together various strategic and grass root organizations together to provide urban resources in rural areas.

-­To create a sustainable model of rural development through a process of initiation from NGO funding and implementation and transferring it to a systematic process of local funding.

-­To work with local government and gradually transfer NGO funding of projects to local businesses, organizations and local tax payers money and make the project self sustainable or with minimal non governmental funding.

-­To study the best practices of the various organizations involved and create a model that can be replicated in other villages.

Factors:
Drought hit village with around 300-350 families. Main source of income is agriculture, but with repeated droughts and lack of water the village is facing severe problem.

Action areas:
-­ Education
­ -Health and Sanitation
­ -Women and Micro credit
­ -Agriculture and Water harvesting
­ -E-learning and management
­ -Advocacy and RTI

People and Partners
­Asha for education- Rajaraman Krishnan (chennai) and Vijay Sappani (Canada)
­IIT Madras- Prof.Kamakoti
­Association for India development (AID)- Dr.Balaji Sampath
­Tamilnadu Science forum (TNSF)- Prof. Ramanujam
­MS Swaminathan Foundation & ISRO- Senthil Kumar
­Rotary club Toronto-Jeff Dobson
­Rotary club Rockfort Trichy
­National College, Trichy- Anantha Narayanan
­REC Trichy- Prof.Chidambaram.
­Anna University centre for women empowerment
­Trichy District Collector-Nandha Kishore
­

Project goals
The project would impact about 500 children at this primary school and nearby villages.The boy: girl ratio is approximately 1:1.
1. An acceptable educational environment that is conducive to and promotes learning.
2. A motivated and trained group of teachers that cater to these children.
3. Children who perform at or above the level expected for their age.
4. Use of technology,computers, library and other resources to further enhance the learning experience.