SCALE - Childhood to Livelihood

Matthew Spacie founded Magic Bus in 1999.  Over the past twenty-one years, he has propelled the organization from volunteers conducting informal rugby sessions and day camps for Mumbai’s disadvantaged children, into one of the largest poverty alleviation organizations in India. 

In recognition of his contributions in the global development sector, Matthew was elected an Ashoka Fellow, a TED Fellow, and an Asia Centre Fellow for Social Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy.

Formerly, Chief Operating Officer of Cox and Kings and Founder of Cleartrip.com, Matthew has extensive corporate sector experience and an intuitive understanding of the development sector. In 2007, he was awarded an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) for services to children in the Commonwealth.

Matthew lives in Mumbai with his wife and three children.  As Global Chairman, Matthew oversees Magic Bus program expansion in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Myanmar, and operations in the U.S., U.K. and Singapore. 

The World Economic Forum estimates that it will take an Indian child from a low-income family, SEVEN generations, to reach the country’s mean income level.  The Childhood to Livelihood model shows this is possible in a single generation.  Children destined for marriage or a hand-to-mouth job, have become young adults who are household bread-winners. Their children will never experience dire poverty. Successive generations of humanity will benefit.

But working incrementally at the community level won’t address the scope of the problem. As 253 million adolescents become job-seekers, no more than one-third will have a higher secondary qualification. School systems focus on basic literacy and numeracy skills over imparting employability and life skills.  

We will reach 2.1 million adolescents by working with Maharashtra’s Department of Education to integrate these life skills within the existing state-school curricula.  This will serve as a model for replication by other state-level agencies.

Globally, young people comprise 1.8 billion of the population with the highest numbers in developing countries. They represent a massive opportunity for economic and social progress .

In India, only 44% of 16-year-olds complete grade 10.  Adolescents in vulnerable communities are not equipped with life skills and are missing an ecosystem of support that encourages completion of education and pursuit of sustainable livelihoods.  The single, greatest indicator of whether a child will continue to live in poverty is whether they believe that a different life is possible.  Life skills build resilience and aspiration, even in the face of systemic destabilizers.  For girls, challenges are compounded by prevalent gender norms that restrict their participation in education and work.  

Magic Bus has demonstrated an increase in secondary school completion rates through life skills training in our current programs throughout India.  But implementing lifes skills at scale requires a matrix of systemic change: policy change advocacy, curriculum (re)development, capacity building, and a framework for teacher participation and community engagement.   We will implement in a manner consistent with the Department of Education’s definition of life skills and add value by building a stable infrastructure without adding complexity to the existing system.

The Magic Bus SCALE program works with adolescents from grades 6 to 10, to enable school completion and delay marriage by building strong life skills, agency, and resilience. The biggest differentiator with SCALE is the strong government collaboration and involvement of the state-run school system and existing government schemes. This alignment will enable rapid scale in Maharashtra and beyond.

SCALE takes a multi-dimensional, “train the trainer” approach that provides targeted interventions for adolescents, schools (teachers and headmasters), local administration, and the community at large. School teachers deliver interventions imparting life skills, self-management, gender-sensitivity, and sexual and reproductive health rights to adolescents.  School Management Committees are convened to address school infrastructure improvement, increase parental involvement, and community awareness on education and gender.  Children and youth collectives are leveraged for peer support. 

Adolescence is a critical stage of development. Access to life skills concepts within school helps students navigate the physical and emotional changes they are experiencing, face the pressure to marry (for girls), and claim the goal of self-reliance through future livelihood.  School is the focus of an ecosystem that is responsive to a child’s needs and encouraging of aspirations. 

SCALE currently serves adolescents in Chandrapur and Bhandara districts in Maharashtra. Maharashtra has a higher child marriage rate than the national average. There is significant school absenteeism and secondary school dropout rates in these communities. Bhandara is plagued by alcoholism and criminal activities that increase the risk of physical harm for girls and women. 

The program primarily serves children ages 11 to 16 years, majority of whom are first-generation learners.  But in keeping with the idea of SCALE across generations, we seek to instill the value of education. The program builds agency and resilience to enable children, especially girls, to be more confident, make decisions, attain awareness of sexual and reproductive health rights, and gain the life skills and employability skills for pathways out of poverty. Girls learn to advocate for themselves, and boys learn to share space equally with girls.

To understand the need, Magic Bus conducts a pre-program survey, and follows with regular assessments. In April 2020, we did a nationwide survey, including Chandrapur and Bhandara, of 3700 children and parents to determine the impact of Covid-19 on their financial and mental well-being. The results continue to inform our approach to SCALE and all Magic Bus programs.

The SCALE program is specifically designed to serve those marginalized adolescents who, without intervention, will continue the cycle of poverty. 

India’s education systems disproportionately focus on scholastic achievements. Departments of Education have begun to recognize the limitations of this but lack a systemic solution.  SCALE combines a proven life skills model with a stable government partnership to ensure scale and sustainability.  In this way, we can make tremendous headway over the next few years to meet the needs of one of the largest cohorts of at-risk young people in the world today. 

I came to India 23 years ago as COO of India’s largest travel group. Mumbai presented a dichotomy as half the city lived in slums and the half in apartments. I wanted to engage, but traditional service-based volunteering didn’t seem to provide the highest value to recipients. 

I used to play rugby for India and one day noticed some young boys who lived on the streets watching our team practice. I called them over to join our game, which quickly became routine.  I was proud to become their coach and mentor. This was life-changing for us all. 

On weekends, I started hiring a bus, the “Magic Bus,” and with the “rugby boys,” we would take 50 children from Dharavi to the mountains or forests. The older boys mentored the younger children. 

My childhood was molded by experiences in the outdoors, with friends and playing sport. Children who live in poverty aren’t as lucky.  

I spent two years doing this before deciding to leave my job and focus on developing Magic Bus.   For five years, in an unpaid position, I tried to understand how we could grow this early success into something bigger.

What I see every day in India is wrong. I’m perpetually dismayed that people are forced to live in poverty and fear. Despite 3.3 million NGOs working in India, our civil society and government can’t seem to move the needle in a meaningful way.  

I know that whilst Magic Bus has, itself, “scaled,” we are still a tiny part of the overall solution.  While we continue to grow in steady, measured increments, this will not meet the needs of our young people.  That is why we need to scale our model through implementation in government-run schools for exponential effect.

Over the past twenty years, as Magic Bus has evolved, so too has my perspective.  India has become my desh, my home.  I am now the father of three young children.  And I understand just how much a parent wants to give their children more than they have themselves.  I am ever more determined that we should not fail this generation of young people and those that will follow. To break the cycle of poverty, these children must be given the support to imagine their future and the tools to make those aspirations possible. 

Magic Bus’s strength is that we embed in the community and make a long-term commitment to support children and help them determine their outcomes. 

In 2014, our senior leadership completed a strategic program redesign in consultation with Bain Consulting and outside experts in global development.  The redesign led to the Childhood to Livelihood (C2L) framework, which has proven successful over the past six years.  As previously described, C2L is the foundation for SCALE. 

Magic Bus regularly measures and evaluates our programs.  The fine-tuning of the C2L model and translation of its concepts into school curricula is both audacious and logical.  Over the years, we have developed and rigorously tested our programs while expanding across India and recently to Nepal, Bangladesh, and Myanmar.  We have taken the time and put in significant effort to build systems, processes, and relationships that promote success.  These include engagement of government stakeholders, technological solutions for program delivery and metrics-tracking, and alignment with corporate social responsibility programs, and institutional funders who also serve as thought partners.

We are ready to move to the next stage of sustainable scale, i.e., embedding the life skills concepts in government schools through state and district level partnerships over the next five years. This integration is a critical driver of the program’s ability to reach the majority of under-served children in Maharashtra.

The opportunity to overcome adversity came early on. The “rugby boys” who started me on this journey were of an age where they needed to find employment and start contributing to their families. I was eager to help and envisioned their bright future. With the best of intentions, I helped these young boys get jobs in offices. However, within six months, all but one of them had left their positions. 

I tried to understand what had gone wrong and how I might have approached this differently. From my heart, I was trying to make a difference, but I didn’t recognize that these boys would face certain cultural and social obstacles in the workplace.  And that they didn’t have the education or soft skills required to navigate an office environment.  This is the fundamental lesson I’ve drawn from over and over.

I’ve learned that leaving a life of poverty cannot be accomplished quickly. It needs years of effort and constant handholding. It requires a continuous pathway to building life skills, confidence, and resilience in children. Quite unlike with the rugby boys, Magic Bus ‘s rigorous programs and methods ensure that regardless of the path a child takes, they are prepared.

Over the first 15 years of Magic Bus, we built an organization with a staff of 1,500 and 10,000 youth volunteers. We now serve almost 500,000 children annually, and that number continues to grow.  But I realized that for long-term success, Magic Bus must evolve beyond a “founder-driven” organization. I knew that the best way I could lead was to let go of the day-to-day operations.

Five years ago, I started the process of transitioning away from the role of CEO to Global Chairman.  We completed a rigorous process to recruit an accomplished professional as CEO to ensure the health and stability of the organization.   

With a great management team in place, a result-driven CEO, and a board that is accountable to the mission, Magic Bus has been able to develop the structure and systems that will ensure success. 

My role at Magic Bus has not diminished. It has transformed. I am now able to serve as chief story-teller, fundraiser, and advocate for Magic Bus.  In many ways, I am back to where I started, engaging directly with the staff, volunteers, children, and families.  At this stage, leadership, for me, means ensuring long term resources to support implementation at scale.  

The SCALE program team is part of a larger organization – Magic Bus India Foundation.  

Magic Bus is a nonprofit started by Matthew Spacie, and is headquartered in Mumbai, India with programs in India, Nepal, Myanmar and Bangladesh. We work with some of the poorest communities in South Asia enabling children and youth, ages 12 to 18 years, to successfully fend off destabilizers such as early marriage and child labor and become first generation salary earners. We do this through programs in life skills, employability skills and job placement.

Historically, India’s education systems and social expectations disproportionately focus on scholastic achievements. But Departments of Education, state and central curriculum development authorities, have begun to recognize the limitations of this.  However, a solution at a systemic level has not been achieved in most states due to lack of a common understanding of purpose, definition, and positioning of life skills education in a traditional framework of education.

Magic Bus proposes that a systemic approach, with strategic engagement of key stakeholders, will result in effective and stable integration of life skills within the broader curriculum in schools.  With significant design inputs in the approach, teachers will not be overly burdened with one more demand on their time.  Life skills content, woven into the fabric of daily subjects, will be difficult to extricate and abandon over the long-term. 

The SCALE program demonstrates a unique approach by embedding life skills in state-run schools enabling rapid scale across each state in the next five years, unlike most programs that are focused on scaling numeracy and literacy initiatives. Magic Bus has consistently demonstrated the success of this approach through increase in secondary school completion rates through the inclusion of life skills in our current school and community programs.

Magic Bus SCALE (School Completion and Livelihood Enablement) is a continuum. The program works with adolescent children from grade 6 to 10 to help them gain strong life skills, and self-efficacy. To do so, the programme takes a holistic approach, wherein; life skills are imparted through school teachers, peer support structures are leveraged, School Management Committee (SMCs) will be activated to work on school infrastructure, and work with parents and community leaders, to bring awareness and importance of delaying age of marriage by keeping the children in school.

The project served 10,000 children in its first year and proposes to serve 90,000 in the second year.  The SCALE program will serve 900,000 children in the next five years, with the goal of reaching 2.1M across all government school, beyond this.

Magic Bus, overall, serves about 500,000 children and youth every year.

In the next year, we plan to deepen our engagement via the SCALE program, expand our community programs both on the ground and via technology, and redouble our efforts outside of India.

In doing this, we will have the basis of an audacious strategic plan to each 20 million children across Asia, by 2030.  

Magic Bus does not lack for drive, creativity, and big picture thinking.  The hurdles we face are the same as always - lack of resources, haltingly slow system change, and overall, the hopelessness that comes with living in poverty.  

Magic Bus is determined, as we look ahead to the next 20 years, to build effective coalitions, invent sound methods, and always harness the power of optimism.

Magic Bus is partnering with the state government and local district administrations for embedding the program in schools. We are working with school teachers and headmasters to implement the model.

At this stage, SCALE is in the initial phase and is funded through institutional grants. 

The program is designed to be implemented through schools and in communities and aims at bringing systemic change by integrating with government-run school systems. We plan to work with curriculum departments (State Councils of Educational Research and Training) of respective state governments to co-create curricular material to be used by government teachers.

At the end of the 5 years program, we plan to leave behind activated school management committees, and children and youth collectives that will continue to work on the goals. Magic Bus will retain a small monitoring presence, but the overall program would be transitioned to the state-run school system.

Magic Bus is proud to partner with the following institutional grantors for SCALE:

Azim Premji Philanthropy Initiatives (APPI): APPI is supporting the SCALE program in Chandrapur, Bhandara (Maharashtra) and Aizawl (Mizoram) districts for a period of 2 years, enabling us to reach around 60,000 children. 

Echidna Foundation: Echidna has provided support for 3 years in Chandrapur district enabling the SCALE program to reach an additional 15,000 children. 

Laureus Foundation: We have received support for 2 years for SCALE in Aizawl, enabling expansion of this to 300,000 children.

In consideration of donor privacy, Magic Bus would be glad to provide detailed budgets to the Elevate Prize committee offline.  

Magic Bus welcomes this discussion with the Elevate Prize committee, offline.