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Navgurukul

An Initiative to provide higher education linked strongly to the employability of the marginalized female students so that they can have access to aspirational jobs like Software Engineering, Analytics, etc.

With the constantly changing nature of jobs and the threats posed by automation, higher education today plays a role more important than at any other time in history. There has been a lot of debate and work to shift to a modern skills framework keeping communication, critical thinking, and digital literacy to the core to keep up with the challenges of the jobs that the 21st century promises.

However, in the absence of proper higher education, the goal can’t be realized fully. Inefficient & inaccessible higher education does not only inhibit the individual to live a meaningful life and have a choice and a voice that education promises. It restricts significantly the potential of the youth to create more jobs and bring about change in their own communities. It breaks the hope of our youth becoming self-reliant and job-creators. Lack of proper opportunities in the higher education sector leads to stagnated growth, improper representation in senior positions, and reduced incentives to have an education-oriented growth mindset for the underprivileged.

Wingify Foundation in partnership with Navgurukul Foundation for Social Welfare provided residential training to female students from underserved and diverse communities. The one-year residential program not only enabled them to be financially comfortable to be able to take bigger risks but also equipped them with confidence and practical exposure to solving real-world problems. Students after pursuing the course were awarded certificates in software programming and we assured that the students get aspirational jobs in the fields like Software Engineering, Analytics, etc.

Vision

We envision a world where everyone has access to an affordable world-class education that enables them to live up to their highest potential.

Beneficiaries
  • Youth from underprivileged or low-income communities who can’t afford an expensive college education.
  • Students with college degrees who haven’t been able to get a good job because of a lack of social or economic means.
Few noteworthy things about residential training
  • Intensive program focusing on modern skills at par with B.Tech (CS) degree
  • No upfront fees. Get a job and pay later in easy installments. This also creates financial sustainability for the program.
  • One-year residential program leading to high-growth careers. Equipping students with the necessary exposure important to avoid stagnated career growth.
  • Simplified entrance based on 8th Grade Maths & 6th Grade English levels and continuously working towards decreasing the baselines for the courses.
  • Guaranteed placements from 20-40k INR per month with a fast-growing career path. Most of the students grow about 25% year on year, financially, once they are placed.
Meraki Mobile Application

Wingify Foundation also supported Navgurukul to develop an e-Learning platform called Meraki to enable students to learn programming through their devices. With the announcement of NEP 2020, it was a critical time to build a quality product in collaboration to enable learners to learn programming through their devices. Before different organizations start building their own applications and fragmenting the space, the question was - whether we can use the open-source collective approach which has been behind some of the most successful programs and applications to come up with a more concentrated effort.

At the same time, Navgurukul’s existing technical infrastructure, curriculum, and alumni/students who could take live classes were a good start. The four-year journey of their team into building a guaranteed job structure for school dropouts and pass outs from marginalized families required them to work in-depth on building programming skills. Growing acceptance of eLearning as a mode of learning and the use of technology to ensure that the students can learn programming on their mobile devices without a laptop, was a powerful catalyst.

Meraki, while focused on learning and practicing coding, was built keeping in mind that the students can practice and learn communication, and a network of role models and advisors can be created for the learner. The app takes care of the learning experience and largely reduces the need for having a well-qualified facilitator for the course. An effort to bring low-cost online tech education to students from low-income families across India.