Rural Entrepreneurship Development and
Literacy Programme – An Inclusive Approach
 

The objective of the Entrepreneurship Development Programme (EDP) is to motivate rural persons, especially the youth and women towards entrepreneurship, develop their business understanding and skills and empower them to independently establish and manage successful enterprises. It covers the basics of enterprise identification, setting up and managing businesses to meet the needs of aspirants as well as existing entrepreneurs.

EDP, an ICT product, has been developed using Adobe Flash; the training is delivered through a multimedia platform. It delivers its objectives using interactive graphics, animations and videos wherein the content of training programme is divided into chapters and modules. All these efforts and visuals ensure that an illiterate person can also learn the level of business without any difficulty in understanding the same. The delivery mechanism is facilitated by well-trained trainers cum mentors whose job is to ensure the simplification of the contents and deployment of participative exercises.

The trainees are helped to identify, assess and shape their personality traits into a suitable enterprise solution. This ensures that the resultant enterprises are long-term solutions based on their personalities instead of short-term forced solutions based on someone else’s perceptions.

The contents and objectives of Enterprise Development Programme are:

• Introducing the fundamentals of business and nurturing a sense of entrepreneurship among the trainees
• Identifying the different stepping stones for any enterprise setup and the possible ways to manage the challenges
• Analysing market opportunities, and understanding the competition and the resources (market survey)
• Calculating the costs and investments for converting the business idea to reality (start up cost, working capital, marketing expenditures)
• Managing book keeping and accounting and identifying the different government schemes that can help the entrepreneurs mobilise their financial resources
• Introducing the learners to the legal obligations and formalities required to be completed for starting any enterprise
• Developing the confidence and language skills by means of participative discussions and games to help learners face competition
• Imparting motivational thrust ‘Yes, you can do!’

TARA Akshar

TARA Akshar is a computer-based functional literacy program which teaches completely illiterate people to learn read and write Hindi (Devanagri) in 30 days.

This programme trains the student to instantly recognise the sound of the letter without hesitation, followed by combined letters (syllables), and then let the students loose on words and sentences. In the TARA Akshar program, the student does not have to TRY to memorise anything; rather, he/she simply watches and plays and the memorising takes care of itself.

The Inclusive Approach: Literacy and Entrepreneurship Together

In the last couple of years, the Indian economy has grown at a phenomenal rate of over 9% per annum. Millions of Indians - who are educated and constitute the middle class - have benefited from this growth. However, an equally large segment of India’s population is either unemployed or not in a position to participate in this growth process and share the benefits just because it is illiterate.

Even after 60 years of independence, India is home to the largest number of illiterates and unemployed on earth. A whopping 400 million are still illiterate. Illiteracy is one of the major causes of socio-economic conflict. Poverty, unemployment and underdevelopment are the associated ills of illiteracy.

Literacy forms the cornerstone for providing equality of opportunity. It leads to increased self-confidence, self-esteem and awareness levels. It allows people, especially women, to participate much more effectively in the development process. For women, it helps tremendously in increasing their status in the family as well as in the society and also leads to gender equity.

Unemployment is an equally serious problem for individuals, especially women from poor families who tend to have little or no education. The consequence is unemployment or low productivity jobs with very little pay, keeping them and their families trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty. According to a study, 15 million jobs are required outside the agriculture and government sectors in India every year. This immense economic need has a huge negative impact on society. Unsustainable consumption practices also lead to rapid depletion of natural resources.

Both the Government of India and several NGOs have been focusing on literacy and rural entrepreneurship as a key route to solving the need for economic and social empowerment. But the major limitation of the existing programmes is the availability of only one part of the solution, which is either a literacy programme or a rural entrepreneurship programme. Additionally, most of the literacy programmes are ineffective and too long in duration, and most of the entrepreneurship programmes lack facilitation of meaningful and viable enterprise options and the inadequacy of market, technical and financial linkages. Most importantly, the need for capacity building supports an enterprises’ life cycle, a facility that is largely nonexistent.

Without any concerted action, illiteracy and unemployment can impede growth and development of the country. TARAhaat, the ICT arm of Development Alternatives (DA), delivers TARA Akshar and TARA Livelihood Academy (TLA), a livelihood arm of DA delivers a rural entrepreneurship programme called Enterprise Development Programme (EDP).

In the first phase for inclusive intervention, the EDP has been customised for Self Help Groups (SHG). In an attempt to customise the EDP, several field trials have been made. The customisation exercise was full of teachings and new findings about SHG expectations regarding enterprise development. Adding to this, the most vibrant outcome of the test and experiment is the effective inclusion of two different contents together. A total of 100 women from different groups have witnessed and benefited by the inclusive intervention of TARA Akshar and the EDP. The EDP programme has been imparted to the same 100 SHG women who have been trained by TARA Akshar in Prithvipur village of Tikamgarh district in Madhya Pradesh. The exercise has given the learning framework and laid the foundation for a ‘demand-driven community product’.

Exercise and Learnings – EDP Customisation for SHGs

A hundred SHG participants have been trained in four different batches, each batch constituting 25 members. The training duration was of seven days with four hours’ sessions every day. The learnings have been incorporated in the product.

• Since many business terms were completely new to SHGs, a dedicated vocabulary chapter on enterprise and livelihood has been introduced. Through illustration and animation, the value chain and the life cycle of any enterprise can be easily briefed to the participants

• The texts’ appearance on Flash has been changed. Since most of the women were either illiterate or faced difficulties while reading, most the time the screen scenes get changed before they were able to complete reading of the text displayed on the screen .The students first recognise alphabets, pronounce them, combine them and then read the text matter. It was also found that the women first listened to the audio voice and then tried to discover where the said alphabet lies on the screen. Considering these learnings, the text appearance has been corrected by introducing alphabet occurrence unlike the sentence occurrence in previous EDPs. Adding to this, there was a substantial pause and time gap in the audio so that women can easily recognise and listen to the voice. A new inside slide bar control is also introduced in the customised EDP so that the facilitator can easily move around scenes to explain them to the trainees

• Since the audience of product is SHG and CIG, a very participative script has been used in the customised EDP so that participants feel active and entertained while being trained. The need was also felt to introduce completely new characters in the new product; three new characters representing SHGs have been introduced. All these three characters are women and their social economical condition has been portrayed just like any general village level women so that the participants can better correlate themselves with the character.

• During the Focused Group Discussion (FGD) with parti-cipants, it has been asked whether they prefer female facilitators over male trainers. The outcome of this discussion was unexpected; almost 80% SHG participants preferred a male facilitator. This feedback has given us the outline to structure the lead character ‘TARAguru’, who acts as an enterprise guru in the customised EDP. Initially, the design team was expecting the lead role to be a female character; after the FGD, the participants made it clear that the TARAguru should be a male character and, when tested, it worked!

• The visuals and illustrations used in the customised product have been given a completely new look. Since the learnings from earlier field trials has given strong inputs on the dress sense of the characters, word selection over texts, background and, more particularly, the simplification of examples were some of the critical areas where correction has been carried out

• It has been found that EDP can better demonstrate its capacity to the TARA Akshar trained participants since TARA Akshar outlines two major benefits – one is the source to make literate participants who can better understand and participate in the EDP training programme and another is their exposure to the ICT domain. When the impact and learning is compared in the scale of TARA Akshar-trained participants and non TARA Akshar-trained participants, it is evident that EDP, when delivered along with TARA Akshar, has much better impact

• In order to start training on the time and ensure that all participants should arrive at the right time, video songs were played at the very beginning of the session. It was observed that participants were very keen to be a part of video right from the beginning; therefore, they used to come on time when the video was about to start. The exercise was appreciated by almost 99% participants even though some of them owned TV sets at home. What they liked in this initiative was ‘watching the video in company and being able to express their opinion on the dresses, ornaments, homes, etc. This gave the women a glimpse of freedom and independency. This initiative received a huge response from the participants. It was also utilised to give the women greater flexibility and opportunity to listen, recognise, understand and practice the reading exercises by putting a marquee of lyrics on the bottom of the videos so that participants can also read what is being displayed. Participants were also encouraged by their facilitators; this exercise gives the participants more flexibility to interact with their facilitators as also other members

• A small batch size is better. It has been realised that participants in groups of 16-20 are best trained

• The training duration which was originally for seven days for four hours per day is not feasible. Since the participants are women with domestic liability, taking out four hours per day was highly impractical. Thus, it was realised that training sessions should be customised vis-à-vis understanding the interests of SHG to 12 days with two hours every day

The EDP has substantially proved its worth as a potential content that can be widely delivered for enterprise development activities.

Other Initiatives

DA has been recognised as a Micro Enterprise Development Centre (MEDC) by Hewlett Packard. There are 13 total such centres across India. The responsibility of MEDC is to encourage entrepreneurship activities among possible stakeholders and mentor local institutions and organisations regarding managing enterprise development programmes. The TARA Livelihood Academy has been authorised to deliver a HP enterprise development curriculum called Smart Technology for Smart Business (STSB). q

 

Praveen Manikpuri
pmanikpuri@tarahat.com