Thursday, July 9, 2009

Project Updates!

Wednesday July 1, 2009

Finally a post that I have been meaning to get at for some time now:

1. Chinyard – Chinyard is a micro-finance and livelihood NGO that we have been working with. We introduced them to the Basic Water Needs filter:



This filter is easy to use and relatively cheap (about 350 Rupies, which is a little over $7). The Basic Water Needs filter is made here in India and is targeting the top of the lower class as customers.
We showed Chinyard how easy the filter is to use and explained that it filters out both dirt and harmful bacteria, where as the most popular and more expensive filters on the market in India today only filter out dirt. Chinyard is in contact with about 3500 different self help groups in about 250 villages. Chinyard invited us to one of their staff meetings where we trained their field workers to use and demonstrate the filter:



Then, we went to two villages with a field worker and spoke to women’s self help groups about the filter (with the field worker translating):


After another meeting with Chinyard, we got wonderful news from them that there is a demand in the villages for the filter! Now we are in the midst of setting up a plan for Chinyard to buy a whole bunch of filters for themselves to sell to the villagers using “pay plans.”
Our one problem is that because the people in the slum neighborhoods cannot afford to pay the whole cost of the filter all at once, Chinyard has to buy the filters themselves and not get paid back for about six months to a year. This is a problem for Chinyard because they cannot afford to front the money either. So, right now we are looking into other funding options as well as maybe just having Chinyard start out slow for their water filter business and only buy as many as they can afford at a time.

We are very happy with this aspect of our project because if successful, it will be fully sustainable; we basically just introduced Chinyard to Basic Water Needs. We are letting Chinyard do everything themselves (ordering the filters, doing demonstrations) so that they are not reliant on us.



2. Education – I spent the past week revising and expanding the health and sanitation curriculum from last summer. The lesson plans were so successful last year, that the primary school asked if the program could run longer this year. I have added three extra lesson plans and updated some of the old ones based on feedback from one of the college volunteer teachers from last year.
We have also decided to expand the program: Last summer there were volunteers from one college, Karnatic University, going to one primary school, The Rajiv Ghandi School, to teach. This year, we will have volunteers from two different colleges splitting up and teaching in probably seven or so different primary schools.
Out of the 15 Karnatic University students who signed up last year, only 6 really stuck with the program until the end and taught the lesson plans week after week. These M.B.A. college students just finished their final exams about two weeks ago, but we caught them before they went on holiday. We are taking 20 volunteers this year: 10 to teach the curriculum and 10 to market the water filter door-to-door around the community that the curriculum is being taught in. The students who volunteered to do the marketing are excited because most of them are business/marketing students and feel that this will be good hands on experience. The students don’t resume school until mid-August, after we go back to America, which is inconvenient because we need to train the volunteers to be good teachers. Luckily, there is a woman who works at Karnatic University that has offered to be in charge of the program. We are happy about this as is ensures sustainability of the program and gives us hope that it will continue in the years to come.

The college we added this year is the Women’s Arts and Commerce college – an undergrad college for women. Their school session just started in mid June, so we have the convenience of working with the girls while we are here. We had a recruitment presentation at which we got about 20 sign ups. This week, I held training sessions for those volunteers who are still interested and by the end of a two day training, we got 17 volunteers to sign the Volunteer Agreement.



On the first day of training I went over the goals of our program and our expectations of the volunteers. I briefly spoke about what it is like to work with kids and techniques for talking in front of a group. Then I gave each volunteer a curriculum booklet and went over each lesson plan. We mock-played each of the activities and I mock-preformed the demonstrations. I asked the girls to read aloud and found that some of them had pretty good English, but a few of them had a very hard time even understanding English – they had stuck through the recruitment and training, but had to ask around to know what was going on. From this we learned that we can’t always assume that we are being understood. We found out that the girls can read and understand English if they have some time with it, so the curriculum having been printed in English wasn’t a problem.



On the second day of training we had the volunteers go in front of the class in groups and choose a lesson to teach to us:

They mostly taught in Kannada (the local language here), but it wasn’t hard for me to tell who felt comfortable and who had experience. I wrote down notes about how well I thought each girl did. Then we split the girls into teaching groups – one leader in each group and making sure to split the not-as-talented girls into different groups.

3. Reverse Osmosis – R.O. is a technique used to purify water on a community wide scale instead of in each house hold. It uses permeable and non-permeable membranes and an equilibrium gradient to filter bacteria and dirt out of water.

With help from Jabshetti, the head of the Hubli office of the Water Literacy Foundation (an NGO), we were put in contact with a community in Gadag, a village about 50 km from Hubli. It looks like the implementation of an R.O. system in Gadag is a viable way to provide the community with water. There is a Swamiji in Gadag who ownes land on which a bore well can be dug to get the water and the Swamiji offered to provide electricity to the system as well.

We haven’t worked out the details yet, such as funding and how involved we as outsiders should get, but I am excited that we made the connection between the city of Gadag and the CEO of the R.O. system company.

Even if we stopped our whole project now, it is still awesome that we are bridging gaps between people who are all here in India and can help each other. We introduced Chinyard to Basic Water Needs and the governor of Gadag to Deepinder, the CEO of Environmental Planning Group Limited, the company that sets up R.O. systems.

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