Our friends at Innovation Alchemy are holding their 7th edition of Alchemix: Innovating on Education, Employability & Livelihood Access. The USF team will be at the event on September 19th in Bangalore and we hope you’ll join us! Register here. If you’re not in Bangalore, you can still participate via the livestream and Twitter chat, by following #Alchemix. Below you can find more information about the event:
These are some of India’s most critical challenges and require an urgent innovation perspective. According to research by the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), India’s exponentially growing population presents an amazing opportunity for the country’s development. This demographic dividend, if harnessed correctly, could put more than 25% of the world’s workforce in India, but without appropriate education— enhanced creative ability, soft skills, working knowledge of English, technical training, entrepreneurship abilities – the 500 million youth in our demography will be left unprepared for the future, threatening the country with a large pool of dependent and potentially unproductive people.
To trigger debate and peer learning for this session, we have invited some insightful speakers to share their learnings on applying innovation to create scalable impact in these areas.
Invited Prctitioner-Speakers include
- Meera Shenoy, Team Member National Skills Development Agency (NSDA) and Senior Advisor, UNDP, Skilling & Employment. Meera built EGMM, one of India’s most successful employability programs under the Andhra Pradesh Government, after which she co-founded Youth4jobs to focus on employment for people with disabilities. As an Advisor to UNDP and a member of the erstwhile office of Advisors to the PM on skilling, she shares a deep perspective on demonstration based policy implementation.
- Madan Padaki, Co-founder and Chairman of Head Held High Services Pvt. Ltd. With an approach based on collaboration and a deep appreciation of ‘market-led’ models, Head Held High is working to build a set of sustainable methodologies in the skills training space.
- Tapan Kumar Das, Co-founder and Vice President of Youth4Jobs. Tapan has extensive experience working with the Government sector at the State & District levels on poverty alleviation programs. He leads the operations of the Andhra Pradesh Centre for livelihoods for people with disabilities (PwD).His experience has given him an insightful perspective on the challenges of integrating people with disabilities into the productive work force of India.
- Ramji Raghavan, Founder and Chairman of Agastya International Foundation. Through Agastya’s initiatives and programs, Ramji has demonstrated the powerful impact of an ecosystem approach to science education in schools. Scaling across Karnataka with Government support and now scaling into MP and other States this models also demonstrates simple and effective service delivery to the last mile.
The Session will focus on the following key questions
- What is the point of education, knowing something well OR the ability to seek answers when needed OR something else….? How do we break accepted methodologies to create a new, more effective and relevant approaches? Share your experience in implementing ideas.
- Lack of aspiration in youth emerges as a key challenge to employability. How do we turn this on its head? How do we help youth blend passion and aspiration in today’s ‘non-assembly line world’? Share your perspective.
- With millions of youth entering the work force each year, how do we build for jobs, entrepreneurship and livelihood at rapid scale? Share an implementable vision.
- The roles of Government :: Civil Society :: and the Private sector. How can they integrate to create cohesive solutions? Share some examples to illustrate.
