Social Business Program

Education and Social Enterprise

Many people don't see how these two things can go together. How do you create a social business and revenue streams based on providing a service that should fundamentally be free and provided by the government? While spending the first few months observing business and classroom management at Lohia's Little Angels School, I had to really consider these questions. How do you balance sound business principles with the morale obligation to provide a child with education? Affordable Private School owners fall into a spectrum of answers to this question. While my owner tries to be stern in collecting fees which keep her business afloat, she would never turn a child away or not let them take exams because their parents couldn't pay. On the other hand, there are owners within our network that kick kids out, even midyear if they haven't paid their fees by term exams. There are other disparities in our network in progression of teaching styles, discipline methods, book keeping, extracurricular opportunities, computer education, among other things, which are essential to ensuring access and quality of education as well as sound business management and should be standardized across the sector.

This is essentially what the 2010 cohort of IDEX is addressing. We have observed strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of our particular schools, and come together to share ideas, best practices, and ways we can collaborate. We are looking for ways to introduce sustainable improvement in our schools that can be adopted by GMC's network of APSs as a whole. At my school, I am concentrating on immediate business management intervention needs and improving programs and activities that directly support student development. Within management, there needs to be formalized financial statements to aid my owner in applying for loans and tracking her income versus expenses. Within the classroom, teachers need formalized lesson plans to help improve classroom management, and help accessing the wide range of resources available through the Internet, as well as more productive ways to discipline. Additionally, with a new computer lab and internet access, new programs that utilize these resources better are needed to show students and teachers all that is available to them at the tips of their fingers. I am working on developing a computer education curriculum with another fellow and will assist my school in introducing vocational training. By introducing programs like Junior Achievements, which provides an interactive program to students to talk about skills, success, and professional goals and uses professional volunteers from the community, I hope to increase the conversation around ambition and introduce role models that can inspire the kids more to concentrate more on school work and look for better opportunities after completing 10th standard.

During my fellowship I will also be working with MCRIL and Gray Matters Capital on their school ratings project. This project aims to give ratings to all the schools in the space to offer a tool for parents and service providers to compare schools and increase school accountability. I will be trained by MCRIL and participate in the actual rating process, and then later will work with both MCRIL and GMC on systems and process consulting, to improve the rating process and sales efforts. Each fellow has a different professional development role like this that works to support the education ecosystem as a whole. Building up our school programs and management matched with supporting the larger ecosystem builds potential for new service providers and social enterprises to enter the space of education. Tackling issues of poor access and quality of education through social business and social enterprise is going to be a challenge but I do believe it is the best potential for swift and efficient change, and could potentially provide a strong case for the power and adaptability of market-based solutions in all kinds of markets.

Affordable Private Schools in Hyderabad - The New Little Scholars School

Walk into any government or Affordable Private School (APS) in India and you are likely to hear the same thing: “HO…”, “HO…”, “USE…”, “USE…”, “HOUSE”, “HOUSE”.  “Again...HO”, “HO…”.  This will continue an average of five times for a list of ten words.  The class work is then to write the ten words in their notebooks three times.  Followed by homework to copy that same list in a different notebook two more times. Not once is a definition of the word, or the Hindu/Telugu translation even mentioned.  You can find it referred to as “RR”, robot recall, in my classroom observation notes from the New Little Scholars School in Hyderabad, India, where I am working for the year as part of the IDEX Fellowship in Social Enterprise. 

One cannot blame teachers in this ecosystem for subscribing to RR however, as it is how every teacher is conditioned to teach, it is how they were taught a generation ago, and their parents the generation before that.  Does, then, this pedagogy have any hope for change? 

Luckily, there are a handful of progressive-thinking school owners who have started APS all over Hyderabad, and are attempting to transition from RR to a higher quality education where students are taught to understand, comprehend, and most importantly, think.    How is this happening you ask?  As any good Social Enterprise Fellow would say, with the help of the social business sector of course!  But in this case it is actually true.  As more APS emerge in the education sector, so do service providers that cater to their needs.  Teacher training that steers away from RR, for example, is a highly demanded service for these school owners.  The New Little Scholars Schools has been using Empathy Learning Systems (http://www.empathylearning.com/) for about two years now.  Imrana, the LKG teacher at the school, told me post an afternoon of Genki singing, that the training has made her feel much more confident in her ability to teach her students properly. 

The Teacher Foundation (www.teacherfoundation.org), Butterfly Fields (http://www.butterflyfields.com), Aloha (http://www.alohaindia.com), and Escuela Nueva (http://www.escuelanueva.org) are other examples of social businesses bringing new curriculum and pedagogy to the sector.   Outside of training and curriculum development there are service providers for setting up sustainable libraries, Escuela Nueva and Pratham Books (http://www.prathambooks.org); computer labs, Empathy; career and life skills development, Junior Achievement (http://www.ja.org), and a rating system to begin making the APS market more competitive, Gray Matters Capital (http://www.graymatterscap.com/affordable-private-school-initiative). 

But what is driving APS owners to invest in teacher training, curriculum tools, and technology towards higher quality education?  Why not continue to teach by RR and produce students without a deeper capacity to think for themselves?  Because these schools are social enterprises in their own.  They are in an increasingly competitive market and driven by consumer needs and demands.  Even if uneducated themselves, parents, their consumers, know that they want their children to be competent in English and have the skills necessary to become doctors and engineers.  And they know that trained teachers, library books, a computer lab, and science fairs are the type of things that will get their children there. 

So the New Little Scholars invests in Imrana, encourages student participation in Design for Change (http://www.designforchangecontest.com), and battles Reliance Network tirelessly in an effort to get Internet in the computer lab, to give parents the quality education they demand and become the best social business they can be.
      ~Ilana