The Path Towards Youth Skilling

 

Authored by Archana Sahay, CSR Head, APJ, Dell Technologies

Dell Technologies is committed to driving human progress with its technology and expertise to help do good for people and the planet. With this vision, Dell had launched Legacy of Good 2020 goals that were 85% achieved by the end of 2019. To take the commitment a step further, on creating a positive and lasting social impact on humankind, Dell Technologies launched Progress Made Real 2030 goals with the objective to advance sustainability, cultivate inclusion and transform lives around the world, upholding the highest standards of ethics and privacy.

With a firm belief that students are the future of India, one of the key goals for Dell Technologies is to deliver sustainable connectivity and technology access to schools and communities wherever they are. We believe that access to technology dramatically improves lives and with this we aim to advance education initiatives and support the underrepresented communities and government schools. In 2009, Dell Technologies partnered with Sikshana Foundation, a Bengaluru-based NGO. The primary goal has been to improve the quality of education delivered by government schools by implementing integrated technology-assisted structured learning program.

The program ‘Prerana’ focused on motivating students, creating a social classroom, introducing structured practice as part of schooling where educators leveraged technology for teaching, data analytics and decision making.

The first-year of partnership involved providing laptops to all the 128 rural schools in an education block near Bengaluru along with 6000 USB drives (one for each student of grade 6 & 7) in a unique digital drive which helped create digital awareness where none existed at that point in time. Among that batch of students, many have gone to graduate in engineering and one of them joined Sikshana as a software engineer to work on the very same product (STEP) that helped him acquire digital skills 10 years ago. The STEP platform is constantly being upgraded to provide learning opportunities for the youth and during the recent times, it has helped thousands of students with offline learning capabilities on basic smartphones.

Over the next few years, Dell Technologies continued to support the program as the NGO expanded its coverage to over 1000 schools in the state and started showing excellent improvement in learning outcomes. At the same time, Dell also supported in capacity building of the NGO by providing laptops and tablets and other digital equipment to help scale up the NGO operations. Dell employees also volunteered to train the NGO field staff on valuable ICT skills.  A new program called “Girl Empowerment Program” supported purely by volunteers cause-cards took off in a small way and today is helping over 1200 girl students realize their dreams and has become an aspirational program for girls in the state.

The current Education Minister of Karnataka, Shri Suresh Kumar distributing scholarships to the selected girls from Bagalkot district, Northern Karnataka

In 2017, the Karnataka Dept. of Education, decided to expand the program to all the schools in the state covering nearly 50,000 schools with over 3 million children. Sikshana has also entered into a 3-year knowledge transfer agreement with the Dept. of Education sponsored by Dell Technologies. This has enabled the department to run the program on their own, which will continue to help every child in government schools for years to come. 

Starting 2020, the Dell-Sikshana partnership has moved its focus towards skilling and is currently running a program for all high school and ITI students in the State of Karnataka covering nearly 0.7 million students providing them with valuable 21^st century skills like functional numeracy, English communication and skills in Information and Communication Technology.