Everyman's City

Taz Snow, Omar and I visited Akshara and met with Col. Rajan on Saturday (October 29).

See here for details of the massive project Akshara has undertaken in association with the Karnataka State Education Department (the objective is to have every single child in the primary schools in Bangalore to be reading at the levels they are supposed to be by the end of July next year).

He explained the areas in which the project will be needing volunteer assistance. These are:

1. Data collection: this is the earliest step in the process and requires actually traveling to the schools and collecting data regarding the location of the schools, the school strength, etc. Akshara is considering using PDAs/laptops for collecting data. They need help in devising software for entering the data into the PDAs/laptops.

2. Transfer of data to computers: At this stage, the data collected on the ground will be transfered to computers via programs designed for this specific purpose. At the end of the data collection process, Akshara will need the data to be tabulated and presented in a format that will be useful.

3. Data Analysis

4. Assessments: There are two kinds of assessments - at the project level and at the child level. Akshara needs volunteers to conduct assessments of the overall project (how the project is being run) and dipstick assessments (random surveys) of how the children are progressing during and at the end of the program.

5. Documentation: Finally, they will need volunteers to document the entire program from beginning to end. They are also looking for a videographer to make a documentary of this project.

All of this work (other than Documentation, which will be continuous) can be done over the weekends and at Resource Centers (that Akshara will set up in various localities) that are closest to you.

These are the five broad areas in which they need help. If you are interested in any of these five areas, please leave a comment to this post. Col. Rajan is expecting to hear from us by the end of next week. Once we have a group, he's offered to make a presentation (perhaps on a Saturday afternoon/evening or on a Sunday) to us regarding the program and how they see volunteers fitting into the scheme of things. At the presentation, all of us who are interested will get a clearer idea of each of the five steps and we can all decide which areas we will be able to assist in.

Please comment.