MakerGhat

Building entrepreneurial citizens in India through hands-on making education

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.

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.

I have been working with underserved communities in India for six years. I started out doing ethnographic research on community health in a peri-urban Muslim majority region in Delhi, where my family is based. During this period, I became intimately familiar with the dynamics of gender, class, caste, and religion. I decided to pursue a PhD in Human-Centered Computing with a minor in Global Development at Georgia Tech, to train in participatory design of technology, community development, and feminist theory.

Through my fieldwork and academics, I became familiar with the creative potential in communities, despite (and often because of) a lack of a formal education. Among youth, in particular, there is a thirst to challenge the status quo and maximize their potential, but limited opportunities. This led to genesis of MakerGhat.

MakerGhat started out as a community makerspace that I co-developed with underserved college-going youth in Powai, Mumbai. They had been tinkering with limited resources and mentorship for a few years. In collaboration with a local non-profit, Asha for Education, I identified an accessible physical space, raised funds to equip it with tools, and provided workshops on design and technical topics. The entire process of design and operation was in collaboration with local youth.

This spirit of collaboration has remained as MakerGhat grew. We now offer a low-cost, scalable approach to building a maker culture in schools, colleges, and communities. This involves working closely with educators and youth locally to implement locally contextualized maker kits, curriculum, and training.

MakerGhat has reached around 50,000 youth till date, across 400 government schools and community spaces in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu. We have an established product and business model that we have rolled out in several regions, and are looking to grow add 1600 additional maker communities in the next year before targeting scale.

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.

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.

2021
Number of students currently served: 50,000
Number of schools and community spaces currently served: 400

2022
Number of students targeted in the next year: 200,000
Number of schools and community spaces targeted: 2000

MakerGhat aims to develop a maker mindset among youth. We encourage youth to develop a sense of agency and confidence to address local and global problems. As part of this mission, we implement maker kits and supporting curriculum in schools, colleges, and community spaces. Our programs help youth learn technical and research skills to design and implement solutions to challenges in their communities and beyond.

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.

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.

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. 

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

MakerGhat has a special focus on providing educational and economic opportunities to women and girls. We would use the funds from the Pozen Social Innovation Prize to grow our program in all female schools and colleges across India.