Expanding Horizons : Hyderabad Chapter
By Suyash Nigam
In this quarter’s edition of nurturing current ventures and expanding horizons we are going to talk about our existing and new projects in the Hyderabad chapter.
The primary focus of the chapter was in these key projects:
- Anganwadis: Anganwadis are preschool Government programs which cater to children between the ages of 0-5. They provide for and support the nutritional and developmental needs of infants and pregnant mothers. During the pandemic these units were largely left dysfunctional, coupled with the fact that these districts have malnutrition rates exceeding 7 percent, supporting Anganwadis was an uphill challenge. ILP’s volunteers visited local communities and provided support and counselling directly to the families. Use of smart games and instructional videos was adopted.
- Career guidance at school level: Through corporate support from Qualcomm, ILP Hyderabad chapter launched an MDLS initiative. MDLS, Multi-dimensional learning spaces, is ILP’s flagship learning and pedagogy framework. MDLS focuses on experiential learning; involving visual, auditory and traditional reading based methods to distill learning. ILP leverages its in-house developed science kits to kindle curiosity, our digital content is open source and editable and can be used by teachers to cater to varied forms of learning.
- Teacher training initiative: Teacher training has an exponential impact on ILP’s overall mission of empowering children as each teacher has the agency to improve the lives of tens of children. ILP launched a massive teacher training initiative across 1200 schools in Telangana. The training focused on technology proficiency – they were imparted skills to make powerpoint presentations using ILP’s existing digital tools. They were also taught how to create and organize libraries. ILP believes in hands-on and experiential learning and about 5000 teachers were contacted as part of this program. Workshops on career counseling were also conducted so teachers could better empower their students in making judicious life choices.