Scholarship / Leading by identifying issues and implementing impact driven solutions to incubate change [5]

Chevening Leadership Essay

Working in the development sector motivates me to lead, by identifying issues and implementing impact driven solutions to incubate change.

In response to a wide learning gap and high drop-out rates amongst underprivileged school children during Covid-19, I conceptualized and pitched a pilot project to my senior management to ensure that students remained in school. The pilot project aimed to engage students through blended learning, by donating phones to them, and monitoring their adoption of technology.

Fortified by the success of the pilot program, I went onto create the larger 'Phone Schooling Campaign' which raised Rs.4.2 Million to mobilise 1,010 students with devices, data and a daily lesson plan. It's been 5 months and the campaign has led to a 30% improvement in the average foundational literacy and numeracy outcomes of the students. Further, owing to the adoption of technology, there has been a 35% improvement in the teaching quality and acquisition of knowledge for children.

When I conceptualised the campaign I found it imperative involve the community through mentorship, thereby building a resilient support system for these students and taking the load off the teachers. This strategy has brought in increased awareness of life skills and an improvement in the student's spoken English level.

To keep my entire organization motivated to achieve our campaign goals, I'd organize weekly meetings to convey implementation aspects of the project; the insights I shared on blended learning and learner autonomy, reinforced everyone's belief in the project. A direct outcome of this was the creation of a repository of learning aids and worksheets for the students, by my colleagues.

My negotiation skills were effective when I had to bargain on the cost of the devices to fit our campaign budget; I managed to reduce costs by 15% which resulted in 50 more children receiving devices.

It was an ambitious project of scale to pull off logistically and financially as were in the strictest phase of the lockdown and I had to vie for people's attention and funds, which had hitherto gone towards urgent priority areas. Drawing from my past experience of fundraising, I led the marketing teams' efforts by creating a targeted outreach plan with strategically curated collateral to influence a donor's propensity to contribute; we surpassed our target of Rs.3 Million before the deadline.

A watershed moment took place when several devices started giving the students trouble- I acted swiftly to manage the vendor's and NGOs' expectation and came up with interim measures, which enabled the students to continue learning on their devices.

While reflecting upon ways to capacity build this community, I realized that the needs of the teachers hadn't been adequately addressed. I ran a series of webinars focused on teachers' needs and assisted them in pivoting to this new reality which created a sense of solidarity for them.

Based on my abilities, I am applying to Chevening to build my network, create strategic partnerships and emerge as thought leader committed to the common development objectives between the UK and India