Pen Drive Project

The deficiency in educational aid for underprivileged children in India, such as poor support in academics has led to an inadequacy of opportunities for students to get well-paid jobs in life and escape the cycle of poverty.

There has always been a deficit in the teaching workforce of India. However, post the COVID-19 pandemic, it has significantly increased by as much as 1.95% in the year 2021-22 as compared to 2020-21, increasing the vacancy to over a million according to reports published by UDISE and UNESCO. This has led to classrooms having either an absence of a teacher or a large student-to-teacher ratio. Similarly, children from orphanages and poor households have limited access to resources, such as tuition, textbooks, past papers, and
online study material. The number of such underprivileged children in the country was estimated by UNICEF India to be 155 million.

In the state of Tamil Nadu itself, there is a shortfall of 31,490 teachers. This paints a rather grim picture of the educational outlook for students studying in government-run schools. Many schools need to choose between funding for new teachers and funding to provide a better learning experience to students. Students lack resources in their school and despite the prevalence of online resources for various curriculums, students are unable to access them due to limited/no access to technology. Additionally, even when browsing online one would fail to find different state board curriculums being covered in detail through videos/courses, especially in the state's native language. We have identified the gap that’s present in terms of online resources and resources in school that allow a teacher to teach better and for the students to learn effectively. Videos and visual learning models are rarely present in such schools due to the lack of funds.

 70% of households in India have television and this value is 96% in our focus state, Tamil Nadu. Television is the most widespread technology in the country and is due to the government providing free TVs and related services for low/no cost. Despite this, there are no reliable resources, even videos that can be accessed by these students for their state syllabus and school curriculum in Tamil, except for a few initiatives that cover a few topics. 

Our solution is to create educational resources and make them accessible to underprivileged children in Tamil Nadu, India. The educational resources we create are animated videos in Tamil that teach all concepts in the Tamil Nadu State Board curriculum as a course. We make these videos accessible to the children by partnering with underprivileged schools across the state. Videos are loaded into pen drives and distributed to students. For example, each student in grade 7 will get a pen drive that contains videos on all concepts in their syllabus for all STEM subjects. 

Schools or classes within schools generally fall into either of two categories: lack of academic resources or lack of academic resources and a teacher. The solution caters to both groups. In the first scenario, the students learn concepts at school from their teacher and also through their pen drives at home. For example, on a specific day, if a student learns Newton's laws of motion in science class then when they go back home they will watch videos on Newton's laws from their pen drive to get clarity, understand the concept properly, and practice numericals (if present in topic). They will do this for every subject every day. Learning through our Pen Drives essentially becomes a part of their curriculum. In the second scenario, students learn entirely from our videos due to the lack of a teacher. Students again learn concepts at home. We provide an additional resource to all students, and this resource benefits such students the most. The resource is workbooks containing questions from past papers and questions that help build confidence and improve concept clarity. These workbooks are given to students as printed copies but are also present in the pen drives as videos. 

Due to an increasing number of state board schools opting for English-medium learning over Tamil-medium, our videos cater to English-medium students. The language spoken in the videos is Tamil to help the students understand concepts, but all subject terms and definitions are provided in English to help prepare them for examination and improve their English. Our feedback sessions and tests have proved this blend of two languages to be the best for learning. 

You may ask, why Pen Drives? Pen Drives surprisingly can reach over 96% of homes in Tamil Nadu and over 70% of homes in India. Students watch videos from the Pen Drives not by connecting to phones or laptops (which are inaccessible to them) but by connecting their TVs. Due to all the initiatives by the state and central governments, the TV penetration rate in India and its states is very high, making it the most accessible technology in the country. All televisions have a provision for Pen Drives and that's what makes us say Pen Drives can reach over 70% of homes in India - over 70% of homes in India have a television. Since pen drives are cheap and easily transportable, we believe this project can quickly expand to all of India. 

We have a YouTube channel where we upload our Pen Drive project videos along with other YouTube-exclusive educational videos. Here is the link to one of our Tamil videos: 

The target population of our solution is underprivileged students in rural Tamil Nadu. These students come from families that make around or less than 120 USD a month. Such families account for 14% of India's population. This population is not able to afford quality education for children. Hence, children are enrolled in schools lacking rudimentary resources such as teachers or qualified teachers, course textbooks, and exam-type questions. 

The videos and workbooks provided mostly compensate for the resources these students lack. The videos cover all topics in the syllabus and are made with the help of experienced teachers, allowing them to mostly replace teachers and textbooks. The videos are also in Tamil and are animated, which helps ensure that students get complete clarity of concepts. 

The workbooks compensate for the lack of practice questions as the workbooks contain at least 50 questions per chapter with many being past paper questions/similar to past paper questions. The only main limitation of the solution is that students don't have the opportunity to clarify doubts that arise unless they have a teacher at school. We tried to work around this limitation by dumbing down the content and addressing common student questions/doubts during the videos.

Most of all, the majority of households have a television so all students can access the videos through the pen drives.

All three of us grew up in philanthropic families that regularly make family visits to government schools, orphanages, and hospitals. This opportunity allowed us to empathize with children of various backgrounds at a young age and gain insight into their struggles. This knowledge from our interactions has what has helped us develop this project into what it is. 

We believe our team is the best equipped to deliver this solution because we are closely connected to the students and involve the community in the process. Our team leader Santhosh regularly visited orphanages as a middle schooler to teach and interact with children and substituted as a teacher at an underserved school for a month during the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, our team member Dhruthi created a program to teach students at rural government schools in Karnataka, India, and ran it for 2 years before joining this project. Lastly, our team member Ruhan used to actively help natural disaster-hit government schools by providing funding to fix the school structures and by volunteering to create shelters and teach students.

Our prior experiences in the education sector for the underprivileged made us understand the situation of children and identify their needs. It is imperative to identify and solve the actual problem faced by the target community rather than assuming the problem and attempting to solve that. Our interviews with the students highlighted the need for the above as they stressed that NGOs and others come for a while, do what they feel is right, and leave without notice.

We, as a team, ensured that we involved the target population while developing the solution to ensure that we were making a solution that would have an actual positive impact. We incorporated several rounds of feedback into our solution and over time arrived at the pen drive project and its aspects.

To maximize the project's impact, we readily involve many people from our community to get various perspectives and reliable advice. We have four main mentors (our head of school, the headmistress of a government school, the head of a social enterprise, and our team lead's teacher advisor). We have worked with over 30 high school students so far and these students volunteered for a month on average. We also include the students who are directly benefiting from this in the solution development. When we first started, we consulted and worked with the target audience to develop the first of the videos. Currently, we are working with only one school so we visit the school every 2-3 weeks and interact with the students for at least 40 minutes and their teachers for an hour. We have been doing this for the past 7 months and have managed to make a blueprint for the videos and worksheets.

We chose growth as our solution stage. The reason is that we have established a solution that we have been running at in a government school in Hosur, Tamil Nadu for the past 7 months. We are working with the grade 7 batch of the school and have been teaching the entire batch (110 students) through our pen drives. 

As mentioned in an answer above, we have created a blueprint for our videos and articles so are ready and can easily expand the project to grades 8 & above and other schools in Tamil Nadu and the rest of India. Our videos and articles are not specific to a school but instead adhere to the detailed state board syllabus so the content is relevant for all state board schools. We plan to expand the impact to at least 500 students by the end of July 2024. 

In our initial year, 2023, we were able to raise 70,000 INR or $840 for funding (through crowdfunding and bake sales) for the initial phase of our solution implementation. The families of two of us are also ready to donate a total of 150000 INR or 1800 USD once we expand to at least 10 schools. 

We are also working on developing two revenue streams: our YouTube channel and our website. Our YouTube channel is our primary focus. We have uploaded 70 videos and have a total of 428 subscribers and 37,000 views. We upload our Pen Drive project videos here along with other videos that we make specifically for YouTube. We currently have a team of 6 volunteers working on YouTube. We are predicting that we will be able to monetize the YouTube channel by July/October 2024. Our website is our secondary focus. We have uploaded 10 articles so far and they have garnered a total of 154 views. Our plan is to first create an audience base of at least 5,000 subscribers on YouTube and then use YouTube to promote our website. At that point, we will create courses and different subscription models for articles in order to make the website profitable. 

We also recently got selected for the global youth action fund by IB. We aim to get around 2600 USD or 2.16 lakhs INR through the grant. 

We are applying to Solve primarily for 4 things: financial funding, mentorship, networking with successful teams in various fields, and gaining media & government exposure. 

The financial support that will be provided by SOLVE will be of great benefit to us as it will allow us to replenish our funds (we are almost out of the money we raised last year) and begin expanding to other schools and communities. Expansion has been our main focus for the past 2 months as we have an established blueprint and have successfully tested and implemented the project in a school. We need funding primarily for hiring interns who will be able to make the videos. We have made over 16 videos covering 4 different chapters of grade 7 science and math so far. This is a slow pace and to expand our impact we need to make videos on all chapters of all subjects and for all grades (grades 7 and above). We will need a big team of interns to make the videos and that will require us to have a huge pool of money for salary/stipend. Additionally, we require funding to procure some of the pen drives needed for the students we benefit. We try to collect as many as possible through donations but this method was not able to suffice our 100% need in the past and we believe it won't in the future either as our need would only increase.

We already have a few mentors who help us lead the project in the right direction but we get their support very occasionally such as once a month so receiving 9 months of personalized support can greatly benefit the project. Monitoring and aid in achieving our set goals will be of great benefit to us as we are a goal-driven team that sets goals every month. We sometimes struggle to set the right goals and achieve them so having support here will help us make progress at a faster rate. As high school students, we have never actually gotten coaching on running a social enterprise or leading a project so the leadership coaching and workshops will allow us to be better prepared to lead our quickly expanding team and solve our target problem. 

Connecting with SOLVE's established network of successful and newly established and growing teams will be of great benefit to as as we will be able to learn different ways to approach and solve problems and also collaborate with others to maximize the impact. For instance, right now we are collaborating with an NGO that makes recycled paper for printing the worksheets we provide the students.

Lastly, gaining exposure in media and conferences will garner us more public attention. This will help in growing our revenue streams (YouTube and website), raising more funds through crowdfunding, gather more volunteers, and this will pave the path for us to reach higher government officials in India for support and collaboration. 

I think our solution addresses the problem of access to education uniquely and effectively as it relies on existing and accessible technology to reduce cost, improve access, and allow for rapid expansion. TVs are the most accessible technology in India and I feel us catalyzing on that is a unique approach. The majority of existing projects and organizations hire teachers to teach at govt schools, purchase smartphones and laptops for students, and build equal-opportunity cost-free schools. While these can be effective, they are often hindered by other problems. For example, organizations might be able to provide students with smartphones but the students would also need access to electricity and mobile networks and would have to pay to access the internet, which makes the solution not feasible as the percentage of students that can access educational content despite all these struggles is very low. Additionally, these technologies are expensive so huge amounts of funding would be required and unless the organization is a huge philanthropy such as the TATA foundation or a govt organization they would not have the funds to impact a major group of the population.

Our solution is a very cheap alternative. Pen Drives of the size we require cost less than Rs.200 in India as compared to smartphones which cost a minimum of Rs.8000, laptops which cost a minimum of Rs.15000, and schools that cost many lakhs to build. This cheap price allows even a small organization with minimal funding to make a huge impact. Additionally, our solution is also very accessible since televisions are very accessible and all televisions have the provision to connect and watch videos from a pen drive. The students would need nothing more than the TV they already have at their homes to learn. We also are providing videos in the form of a course that allows students to learn regardless of whether they have a teacher at school or not. Unlike resources online, we approach the problem in a different way as our videos explain concepts in the local language but provide terms, definitions and questions in English as our focus is on English medium students. Existing solutions are either in the local language or English entirely and are not the most effective as our primary research with students has revealed that they would understand concepts better when taught in the language but would need subject terms and definitions in English for examinations. 

The solution will showcase a new and improved method of teaching underprivileged children and this will allow other projects to adopt similar techniques and collaborate to maximize the impact. Our method will overall allow more students across India to benefit not just through us but through other initiatives/projects that adopt our strategy. 

Our solution can be broken down to create a logical framework that showcases the relationship between the activities and the outcome. The primary activities of the organization are teaching state board content through pen drives and providing worksheets with practice questions. The immediate outcome of this would be that students have access to learning material and can learn concepts required to do well in their school examinations and develop confidence that will encourage them to continue education (this is important as India has high student dropout rates). Our videos will help them build knowledge over the years and prepare and perform well in their 10th and 12th board exams. Doing well in their 12th boards would encourage them to go to college and would help them enroll in a good college, possibly with a scholarship. This would ultimately allow the students to get well-paid jobs in life and come out of poverty. This would reduce the % of the population in poverty and % lacking access to quality education in the next generations of the country until they reach zero. 

We expect our solution to have the impact measured