MakerGhat

MakerGhat aims to create the next generation of entrepreneurs and leaders who come from diverse socioeconomic groups. Our programs nurture agency and confidence among youth through hands-on tinkering/making.

Our solution is to implement low-cost safe and open maker labs along with 40 hours of a research-backed curriculum in government schools, colleges, and community spaces in India. We do this in close partnership with the state education ministry, local non-profits, and community groups. Our maker labs consist of electronics, mechanics, and craft tools to foster hands-on activities. Our curriculum encourages broad expertise in entrepreneurship and project-based learning, along with verticals like 3D printing and modeling, internet of things, GIS, and artificial intelligence.

Scaling the program will help increase and leverage the participation of low-income and remote groups in the creation, development, and deployment of new technologies, jobs, and industries in India.

MakerGhat aims to create the next generation of entrepreneurs and leaders who come from diverse socioeconomic groups. India needs to generate 90 million jobs by 2030 to avoid economic stagnation, many of which will involve digital/technological competency. To ensure that underserved communities are not left behind, we need to nurture potential entrepreneurs within this population who can lead job creation for themselves and their communities.

We believe that youth at the cusp of entering the workforce are particularly well-placed to become entrepreneurs (see UN report on youth entrepreneurship). 180 million youth will enter India’s workforce in the next 15 years, over half of whom will come from underserved backgrounds. Despite the high need for STEM skills, over 80% of the engineers are unemployable for any job in the knowledge economy due to lack of hands-on experiences.

Traditional education models have failed to meet this need. There is a need to foster hands-on STEM and entrepreneurial skills. Our solution with maker labs and supporting curriculum involves two key outcomes:

1. Development of self-efficacy and grit that is essential for entrepreneurial activities.

2. Increasing interest and hands-on skills in STEM, with the goal of enabling self-directed learning in the long-term.

Our target audience is youth (9th-12th grade, college students) from low-income and remote groups that will enter the workforce in 1-4 years. Many of them have suffered from historical class and caste-based marginalization and financial distress.

These are youth with high energy and access to community knowledge on historic hands-on practices of repair, crafts, agriculture, small businesses, and more, but may perform poorly in traditional education models. With mentorship and educational support, we believe that these youth have the potential to leverage and strengthen their hands-on skills to become entrepreneurs and job creators. 

We target this population through government schools and colleges, and community spaces catering to this population (such as village-level/panchayat libraries and after-school centers). We have a special emphasis on serving all-girl institutes and ensuring that over fifty percent of our target population are girls to address historic gender disparities.

Our maker labs and curriculum are carefully customized to the needs of the youth in each location we implement the program. We follow a human-centered design approach, spending several weeks working closely with youth, educators, and other stakeholders to ensure local relevance of maker labs and content delivered. We have also developed a youth board of students who have gone through our programs, coming from diverse backgrounds, to provide ongoing insight and feedback on our programs.

Maker education is particularly well-placed to support in the development of such skills due to the focus on self-directed learning and close links to students' experiences with hands-on learning in their communities.

The challenge urges us to consider how workers in India and Indonesia can gain the skills they need to participate and prosper in the digital and technology-driven economy of the future. Specifically, MakerGhat is aligned with the target to: Increase and leverage the participation of underserved communities in India—especially women, low-income, and remote groups—in the creation, development, and deployment of new technologies, jobs, and industries.

We believe that youth at the cusp of entering the workforce are particularly well-placed to quickly develop STEM and entrepreneurial skills essential to become job creators and technology developers. By implementing maker labs and supporting curriculum in close collaboration with government partners, we help develop an entrepreneurial spirit and interest and skill in STEM among underserved youth. Maker education is particularly well-placed to support in the development of such skills due to the focus on self-directed learning and close links to students' experiences with hands-on learning in their communities. 

Our Maker Labs consist of electronics, mechanics, and craft tools to foster hands-on activities. Our curriculum encourages youth to gain broad expertise in entrepreneurship and project-based learning, as well as verticals ranging from 3D printing and modeling, electronics and the internet of things, artificial intelligence, and more.

Collectively, our easy to implement model leads to underserved youth gaining interest, skill, and self-efficacy to enter STEM and entrepreneurship, further leading to job creation and technology development in the long run.

Azra Ismail (Co-founder, CEO):
PhD in Human-Centered Computing at Georgia Tech, GVU Foley Scholar; WAIM (Work in the Age of Intelligent Machines) Fellow; ex-Philips Research; ex-Wadhwani AI; Exceptional Leader of Excellence by the Women Economic Forum; 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics™ 2021.

MakerGhat’s key feature is that we create scalable makerspaces that deeply engage local communities, and are operated end-to-end by members of the community. Our most important differentiating factors is our attention to curriculum and pedagogy, while remaining scalable, which is missing in ongoing programs.

Among makerspaces, we offer a low-budget space that is affordable, learning-driven, and designed to meet the needs of underserved students. The makerspace is situated within the community and is operated by the community. A maker lab can be set up for less than $200. Once the space has been setup, the only cost is for materials, making it very sustainable to operate.

Among education non-profits, we take an action-oriented perspective to learning. Learning is situated in the contexts that students are familiar with. We focus on nurturing long-term, community-based engagement. The founders of MakerGhat are trained as engineers as well as researchers in education and community development and take a data-driven approach to measuring impact and learning. We work closely with teachers to ensure assessments are conducted and that every student gets personal attention. Most other makerspaces are focused on ‘front-end’ results such as what kids have built and the number of students attending.

Through our programs, our vision is to create a model that can be replicated by others and can be integrated into education systems. We are committed to making all our materials open-source in line with this goal.

Our solution involves a suite of technological tools that are made available in the form of low-cost Maker Labs (INR 15000, USD 200) to youth and educators to engage in STEM and entrepreneurial education. Our Maker Labs consist of electronics, mechanics, and craft tools to foster hands-on STEM activities. Our curriculum encourages broad expertise in project-based learning, as well as verticals like 3D printing and modeling, internet of things, robotics, and artificial intelligence that are posed to accelerate and generate more jobs.

MakerGhat provides an easy to implement modular solution with three inputs: (1) a safe physical space to experiment with a high room for failure (e.g. a village library or classroom), (2) locally customized maker la and supporting curriculum, and (3) trained local mentors who guide learning. 

This leads to the following outputs that are essential for successful STEM careers and entrepreneurship: self-efficacy, grit, critical thinking, and creativity. 

Our program further leads to our targeted long-term outcomes of gainful employment and creation of entrepreneurs.

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Extensive research on makerspaces and maker education has demonstrated how they help individuals identify problems, build models, learn and apply skills, revise ideas, and share new knowledge with others. Maker education has demonstrated impacts on student interest, creativity, independent thinking, and STEM skills.

In the next five years, we aim to impact over 10 million youth (yearly) and 25.5 million youth (total). In addition to engaging in direct implementation in collaboration with government and non-profit institutions, we also aim to make our maker labs and curriculum open source and accessible to enable anyone to build a maker culture in their community. As part of this initiative, we are also working with edX to develop a series of free online courses on hands-on making.

We also aim to integrate with school boards fully, and project reaching many more students if we succeed in this goal.

We track the following indicators as part of our programs:
- Number of schools and students reached
- Increase in self-efficacy, grit, critical thinking, and creativity
- Percentage of students interested in pursuing entrepreneurship
- Percentage of students interested in pursuing STEM

Process Risks

• COVID uncertainties, in case there is a new outbreak and schools have to close down again.

• Slow back and forth and uptake with government partners.

Impact Risks

• If there are other concurrent programs happening at the same time, we must ensure that the outcomes do not conflate or conflict with the new programs we launch.

• Teacher training and onboarding is key to the success of our program: in our experience, keeping motivation levels of instructors high is important to ensure the program is implemented as envisioned. Our program relies on making instructors self-sufficient with minimal external intervention, with the goal of making this program sustainable in the long term, but this risks the possibility of teachers dropping out if there is not enough motivation.

Process Risks

• COVID uncertainties: at the worst case, this will set us back by a couple of months. We are also creating an online curriculum for this scenario with edX.org

• Slow back and forth and uptake with government partners: we have mitigated this with our direct-to-school relationships (we already have 350 schools we are directly working with in AP from our prior projects, and CMCA, our implementation partner for Karnataka for this specific project, already has direct relationships with 500 panchayat spaces)

Impact Risks

• If there are other concurrent programs happening at the same time: we seek to collaborate and integrate sustainably as much as possible with other tangential programs (such as socioemotional learning programs, etc.)

• Teacher training and onboarding is key to the success of our program: To mitigate drop in teacher motivation levels, we will be doing extensive instructional design research while building the teacher training modules and the student curriculum, leaning on our Stanford research expertise and partnership, while simultaneously conducting multiple pre-program pilots with a small subset of teachers and schools.

We have eight team members on the solution team, including six full-time staff, one part-time staff, and one contractor.

Team Structure

Our team is composed of leading education and human-centered design experts from Stanford and Georgia Tech with years of experience working closely with underserved communities, non-profit and industry leaders, educators, entrepreneurs, and makers of all ages. Our team is over 50 percent women (including the CEO), and includes those from rural and non-traditional education backgrounds. c

Leadership Team

Azra Ismail (Co-founder, CEO):
PhD in Human-Centered Computing at Georgia Tech, GVU Foley Scholar; WAIM (Work in the Age of Intelligent Machines) Fellow; ex-Philips Research; ex-Wadhwani AI; Exceptional Leader of Excellence by the Women Economic Forum; 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics™ 2021.

Aditya Vishwanath (Co-founder, COO): 
Forbes 30 Under 30 Education list; Knight-Hennessy scholar at Stanford University, PhD in education and technology design at the Graduate School of Education; Co-founder at Inspirit; ex-Google for Education.

Ujwal Thakar (Board Member): 
ex-CEO of Pratham, India's largest NGO in the elementary education space; ex-CEO of GiveIndia, a pioneering platform for philanthropic exchange; banker for 28 years, held key senior management positions at several leading banks including Standard Chartered Bank, BNP Paribas and Times bank. 

Our team is committed to having gender parity at every level of the organization: among the leadership, student body, and advisory board. We are also committed to ensuring diversity in educational qualifications, location, and languages represented among our employees. We have also created a youth board composed of past students from diverse backgrounds who actively advise on programs and ensure that their viewpoints are represented.

These DEI efforts are led by MakerGhat's CEO, a Muslim woman (religious minority in India), who is an expert in gender studies and technology design.

We closely partner with government, non-profit, and academic institutions to develop and scale our programs.

List of partners:
Andhra Pradesh Government
Tamil Nadu Government
NITI Aayog
edX
Stanford University
Georgia Tech
The Nudge Foundation
Lend-a-Hand India
Agastya Foundation
Udhyam Foundation
Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME)
CMCA
Reap Benefit
1Bridge
Aflatoun
Asha for education
Vidya
LCCWA

Our operational model involves four elements:

Safe physical spaces (and portable kits):
low-cost makerspaces or portable kits equipped with tools and materials, help with maintenance and daily operations

Training:
training of teachers and administrators on strategies to build a culture of making and student-led learning

Curriculum:
weekly workshop, aligned with syllabus, research-backed, customizable per grade and region, open-source

Monitoring and Evaluation:
weekly embedded assessments, data-driven model, audit every month

We believe that Caterpillar Foundation's history of work on STEM education and workforce readiness makes it the ideal partner for our program on hands-on maker education among underserved youth in India. While the financial resources will go a long way in helping us implement our programs in 6000 schools across Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu, we are much more excited about the potential to partner with Caterpillar on creating pathways for sustainable livelihoods and entrepreneurship opportunities for youth, and potentially offering mentorship opportunities through Caterpillar's network of employees.

In addition, Solve's network of resource partners, mentors, and coaches across industries and sectors will be highly valuable in helping us achieve our vision of scaling an open-source model for hands-on maker education.