NalandaWay Foundation Take It Eazy

The COVID-19 pandemic is the biggest health crisis the world has faced in recent times. Children are at higher risk of suffering from intense psychological distress due to the pandemic. Every aspect of a child’s life has been impacted, from their health, development, learning, behaviour, their families’ economic security and their protection from violence and abuse, and most importantly their mental health.  

We propose to address the psychosocial distress faced by adolescents between the ages 13 to 17 due to the pandemic. We will provide the students with an audio, video and digital storytelling-based program that would address their mental health and wellbeing.

Our custom curriculum based on UNICEF Life Skills Framework will help them cope with the multiple stressors and significantly improve their overall wellbeing. The solution, if scaled globally, can positively transform the lives of vulnerable adolescents living in many parts of the world.

Several studies in the last one year have thrown light on how the pandemic has affected the mental wellbeing of children. Children are experiencing stress because of parental anxiety, disruption of daily routines, increased family violence, home confinement with little or no access to peers, teachers, or physical activity, sleep disturbances, excessive anger and difficulty in concentrating. 

The pandemic has put 89% of adolescents out of schools (i.e. roughly 1.54 billion students, of which 0.74 billion are girls). Approximately two-thirds of the children who are quarantined due to pandemic reported fear, helplessness and worry.

Children who are most vulnerable face more challenges and may therefore need more care and attention. Many of these children do not have strong support systems and emotional references. The fear and stress caused by COVID-19 may increase their sense of insecurity and cause even more serious mental health issues if not addressed in a timely manner.

Ref - https://www.unicef.org/india/what-we-do/adolescent-development-participation

Our program aims to address the psychosocial distress faced by adolescents between the ages 13 to 17 due to the Pandemic. The “Take It Eazy” program was successfully piloted in Tamil Nadu in 2020 in partnership with UNICEF. We propose to scale it across the country and possibly in other countries in partnership with local community organizations.

The solution aims to provide the students with an audio, video and digital storytelling-based program that would address the stressors they are facing and significantly improve their mental health and wellbeing.

The program would communicate to the intended audience in the following ways -

30 Audio stories would be created and hosted on an IVRS cloud server. Students would place a missed call to a predetermined telephone number. They will get an automated call back with the story for the day being played on their phone. 

50 Digital stories in the form of byte sized videos and social media posts will be posted periodically on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. 

The learning design would be based on the UNICEF Life Skills Framework especially on skills pertaining to self-awareness and navigating adolescence focusing on the dimension of empowerment based on the framework. 

The target population is the adolescent students in the age group of 13-17 across several states in India. Children are affected by multiple stressors due to fears and overwhelming news about Covid-19 infection and the need to continue their education without the usual support from schools. 

Domestic violence, abuse in the form of forced labour, early marriage, unable to meet friends, talk or play, uncertainty over parents’ loss of livelihood due to the lockdown and displacement are causing tremendous damage to their psychosocial wellbeing. It calls for a multipronged approach that helps them with care, understanding and gentle guidance to deal with oneself better. 

Several studies have indicated the lack of support system at home and the need for a concerted effort to deal with this unprecedented situation. 

The solution we had piloted last year in the state of Tamil Nadu gave us insights into the needs of the children, effective ways of engaging with them and providing practical solutions that address their stressors. We are looking to deepen the solution and expand it to several states of the country. 

The solution will enhance their emotional well-being, problem solving ability, improved social relationship and decision making ability. It will help them develop optimism about their future and decisions regarding subjects to be selected in higher classes. Increase in gratitude, closeness to others, perseverance, and improving their own problem-solving abilities are some of the focus areas of the solution. 

The specific problem we are addressing viz. the multiple stressors due to Covid-19 causing serious mental health issues in adolescent children aligns with the Challenge as detailed out in the Challenge Overview section. 

The target population is secondary school children in the age group of 13-17. As described in the Challenge Overview, it is of paramount importance to address the challenges faced by this vulnerable group.

Our solution will enable sound mental health of children and significantly enhance their overall mental wellbeing. This is much in alignment with the Challenge dimension we have chosen to address.  

In partnership with UNICEF, we had successfully piloted the solution in the state of Tamil Nadu for a target population of 650,000 adolescent children facing their Class X board exams during May-Jun 2020. 

The key findings include a statistically significant increase in the children’s overall well-being after the program.  Specific improvements were witnessed in their emotional well-being, problem solving ability, improved social relationship and decision making ability. Children found the audio episodes of the solution useful and joyful, and reported an increase in gratitude, closeness to others, perseverance, and their own problem-solving abilities.

Our goal is to expand on this and take the solution to several states within the country, as we are recovering from the devastating effects of the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. It will benefit millions of needy and vulnerable children across the country.

The solution uses the Interactive Voice Response System to reach adolescent children from disadvantaged backgrounds who do not have access to a smartphone or internet. Children could give a missed call to a designated number and the IVRS system automatically places a call to their number and plays the audio story of the day. 

Thus, this innovative model ensures that barriers such as access to technology and data are overcome effectively. All that they need is a basic phone. With the penetration of mobile telephony to the poorest of segments in India, the IVRS technology ensures that they are included and served by the solution. 

This approach will catalyze more solutions in the space and push others to look at overcoming the barriers posed by socio economic conditions and access to technology. 

The pilot solution we ran last year supported 620,000 adolescent children. We propose scaling the solution to 4 million children across 5 states in the next one year. It can be scaled to reach 20 million plus children in 5 years. We will consider taking the solution to other countries besides India.

The monitoring and evaluation plan for our pilot program was designed to ensure robustness in the curriculum and also to gain true data for the purpose of objective evaluation of the program. The goals of the monitoring and evaluation of the program were as follows - 

1. To ensure that the curriculum is contextual of the children
2. To make the episodes as helpful as possible for the children
3. To understand the quantitative and qualitative outcomes of the program
4. To determine if there was any improvement in the the well-being of the children

The monitoring of the program was conducted by collecting the qualitative feedback from the listeners. To evaluate the quantitative outcomes of the program, baseline and endline evaluations were conducted. To collect the data for the evaluation, an interactive voice response system (IVRS) was used wherein the items of the scale along with the options were read out in an automated call, and the children were asked to register their responses by entering the corresponding number on their respective keypads. 

Data gathered from the baseline and the endline was analysed using paired-sample t-test to measure the difference in well being scores of the sample. Scores of each statement on the scale were also compared for a deeper analysis of the well-being. To collect the baseline and endline data, Short Warwick Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale (SWEMWBS) was used.

Thus, a comprehensive Monitoring & Evaluation strategy and plan were implemented to measure the outcomes both in quantitative and qualitative terms. 

The solution team comprises of 15 full time staff for design, development, project management and M&E. We tap into a pool of external consultants and companies for producing the audio visual content. We will ramp up Implementation Coordinators as needed once the solution scales to several geographies. 

Founded in 2005, NalandaWay has been helping children raise their voices and issues through theatre, visual arts, music, dance, radio and films. More than 50,000 children benefit from our programs every year and over a million plus children have been served by us thus far. 

Our team comprises a diverse pool of talented and experienced personnel with unrelenting passion, commitment, deep expertise and robust experience in designing, implementing and monitoring large scale programs that have positively transformed the lives of disadvantaged children.

Our resource pool includes world class curriculum experts, early childhood care specialists, experts in mental wellbeing, positive psychology, child centered learning and pedagogical practices, leveraging technology for scaling programs to reach maximum beneficiaries, monitoring and evaluation specialists to quantitatively and qualitatively measure the outcomes of programs, financial and accounting personnel, program and project management specialists, field coordinators and specialists with extensive experience in implementation of programs and engaging beneficiaries. 

We also tap into a huge network of external consultants and partner organizations for augmenting our team and tapping into their expertise as needed as part of many of our program design and implementations. 

Our organization is committed to building a diverse, equitable and inclusive leadership team. Our advisory board and leadership team comprises of women members and over 70% of our middle management roles are filled with qualified and experienced women members from across socio economic backgrounds and classes. The solution team will be led by a woman program manager and many members of the team would be women and from varied socio economic backgrounds, qualifications and experience levels. 

We share MIT's philosophy of cultivating a community focused on shared values of excellence, community, equity, belonging, openness, integrity, and mutual respect.

As with MIT, NalandaWay is an equal employment opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for selection in the solution team and will not be discriminated against on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, ancestry, or national or ethnic origin.

We are keen to tap into the MIT Solve ecosystem of grants, funding support, peers from whom we could take inspiration and guidance and join the powerful network of impact-minded leaders across industries and sectors.

Access mentorship, coaching, and strategic advice from experts, as well as the Solve and MIT networks will be of great help to us as we scale our solutions. Receiving monitoring and evaluation support to build an impact measurement practice will go a long way in strengthening our M&E practices and approaches. 

We will greatly benefit from the world class experts and innovators of the MIT Solve group. We are keen to strengthen our financial and accounting practices, compliance and governance frameworks as we scale our operations. We will also benefit hugely from access to PR experts and marketing specialists who could create a compelling brand presence for us. The use of latest technology in solving problems and scaling our solutions to larger beneficiary population is something we are keen to explore. 

We would like to partner with technology organizations that can help us in arriving at innovative, cost effective and scalable solutions that can serve millions of deserving students.

We would like to work with management consultants who could develop a long term strategic roadmap for our solution. 

We would like to work with Monitoring & Evaluation specialists who could help us fine tune and calibrate our M&E strategies for robust measurement of outcomes and impact. 

We have won the Millennium Award as one of the top 3 education innovations in the country. This award is instituted by USAID, FICCI, Govt. of India and UK Aid. Our innovative classroom solutions that leverage the power of art and storytelling in significantly improving learning outcomes, mental and social emotional wellbeing of children and the foundational learning can be tailored and taken to U.S.-based primary and secondary classrooms. 

Our Project Sakhi, targeted at adolescent girls in the age group of 13-17 is committed to foster a healthy sense of self-worth and confidence amongst the girls, build awareness, skills, and habits needed for continuing physical and mental health, enable the girls to be emotionally resilient and handle challenges constructively and equip them with the knowledge, attitude, habits and skills required to become financially independent and pursue a vocation of their choice. 

The ASA Prize for Equitable Eduation will help us take this solution to the classrooms in the US and help adolescent girls from disadvantaged backgrounds succeed in education and life.

Our Project Sakhi, targeted at adolescent girls in the age group of 13-17 is committed to foster a healthy sense of self-worth and confidence amongst the girls, build awareness, skills, and habits needed for continuing physical and mental health, enable the girls to be emotionally resilient and handle challenges constructively and equip them with the knowledge, attitude, habits and skills required to become financially independent and pursue a vocation of their choice. 

The Innovation for Women Prize  will help us take this solution to the classrooms in the US and help adolescent girls from disadvantaged backgrounds succeed in education and life.