Udhyam turns 5

“sparkle in the eyes?and

a junoon to do something”

These 5 years flew by!!

I feel fortunate and glad that Udhyam has been able to create far more impact than anticipated at inception.

I can credit this to

• Focus & iterations: Staying focused on the entrepreneurial mindsets & entrepreneurship space and constantly improving; And a constant push for creating? Impact @ Scale?
• Great partners : Change has been possible because of school leaders, teachers, ministers, bureaucrats, partner NGOs, funders & volunteers!???
• Foundational principles: Udhyam's way of living the 3 learning principles?(1) Learner & Vyapari Autonomy (2) Learning by Doing and (3) Real World experiences?
• A great team that has come together towards achieving our Vision.?
• Lot of luck!?

Here’s a quick snapshot of some memorable parts from the journey of 5 years:

2017

Udhyam first started experimenting? programs at Christel House which felt super impactful! Soon after, on 30 March 2017,? Udhyam Learning Foundation was registered as a company. We were able to work with My School, Ghousia Polytechnic for Women.? One of the students, Sana went on to become a facilitator at Udhyam’s Youth Engagement and motivated many young girls. Another student started a business called Rusari.

The constant feedback for us was that confidence & communication in the learners shot up. I remember the Ghousia Principal, Azra mam saying?

"Ye ladkiyan wo nahi hai … ye to poori badal gayi hai"?

Here are a few testimonials from these 3 school leaders:

Shobha Menon from Christel House, Azra ma’am from Ghousia Polytechnic for Women and Mrs Vidya from My School.

The experience and feelings the 3 of them capture above - is what built the conviction for us to build Udhyam Shiksha - the team that works in Education.

As 2017 was nearing a close, Udhyam Vyapaar started with the vision of enabling growth for nano-entrepreneurs in December with Radhakrishna Karumanchi (RK) & Krishnan.?

2018?

We started a Big Bang Summer program across 20+ schools & ITIs with business projects as a key part of the program. A facilitator network came together to make this happen & did brilliant work!

Another highlight for this year was our 1st offsite in Coorg, where the team coined the Udhyam vision:?

Co-creating a caring world where people fearlessly pursue their potential?

- while too wordy, and sometimes complex: this has remained the life force of Udhyam.?

We continued with a large number of experiments in Vyapaar i.e. Tea & Ironing as key lines of businesses we wanted to focus on. Arrived at Income Uplift as the key measure of success for Vyapaar.

Later in the year, Deeksha institutions enabled us to do our 1st in-timetable & in-curriculum program. Shiksha decided to focus on Government partnerships & we reached a simpler understanding of our work - as enabling intrinsic Learner Agency.

By the end of the year, we had worked with more than 1000 students directly.

As a cherry on top, Krishnan started to lead Udhyam Shiksha.?

2019?

The Entrepreneurship Mindset Curriculum (EMC) was built and rolled out in all 1,024 Delhi government schools.? This program has gone from strength to strength.

At around the same time, Haryana partnership & work strengthened and was poised to create a large impact across ITIs in Haryana. We started investing significantly in Curriculum and Monitoring & Evaluation of our work. To continue the spirit of experimenting we started Quality & Scale Lab?, with an intention to create high quality & high scale experiments.

In Vyapaar, Coal 2 LPG project was “ironed out'' through deep immersion and led to significant impact for Vyapaaris? by way of time saved, reduced cost and increased revenue. There was also the benefit of health improvement which we aren’t able to measure.

2020?

The pandemic started spreading worldwide. COVID led schools, ITIs and vyapaaris to shutdown ??

We persevered.

In the light of things shifting online, we started our experimentation with QSL++ team by exploring how we could reach learners directly. This led to Call-A-Kahaani (which is now being incubated at Udhyam) and Fundoo - in partnership with UNICEF. In 2020, we also went on to establish partnerships with Maharashtra and Kerala. Now, we were beginning see a strong pipeline of state government partnerships in sight for Shiksha.

For Vyapaar, we received our first few CSR partners being JPMC, Titan, McKinsey to help us in our mission to enable vyapaaris. Later that year, Menaka Menon joined Udhyam to lead Vyapaar.

Read more in our annual report

2021

In 2021, we saw Shiksha partnerships scale up to 10 state governments.? We started working with Assam, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Andhra Pradesh, and Nagaland. We later decided to opt out of Assam, so Shiksha currently works with 9 state governments in India.?These might feel like just numbers, but each of these partnerships holds the potential for working deeply with the state education system and other partners and co-imagine and co-create large scale impact!

The Business Project at scale a.k.a Business Blasters, where 3L students from Delhi government schools made 51K teams and received ?2K each from Delhi state government to start their own business projects was hugely successful and visible from the TV show aired in Dec ‘21 & the Investment Summit & Expo in Mar ‘22.?Besides exposure to business, I had penned 9 reasons why students should do a business project.

Shiksha also started a partnership with CBSE for Online Entrepreneurship Program this year. funDoo received an Innovation Grant to the extent of ?1.3CR from UNICEF International.

The Istri project (former Coal 2 LPG project) changed focus to market transformation and is able to find strong levers of working with retailers, subsidy & financing to accelerate impact. Shiksha found a new leader in Shyam and Krishnan is now a co-founder at Udhyam!?

The 2020-2021 annual report captures the year in more detail.

A summary of where we are in numbers:

• We have touched lives of 8.4 lakh people!
• Formal partnerships & active work with 9 state governments.
• Just this year, we enabled 25,048 teachers over 287,760 hours of teacher training. The # of student hours that all these teachers enabled over the year is huge!
• Istri model is able to create an IMM(Impact Money Multiplier) of over 8!!(For every rupee spent there is a return of Rs. 8/- in direct Vyapaari impact, accrued over 3 years)
• An incredible team of 97 full-timers
• An investment of Rs. 11.26Cr in the current FY (our CA calls it our annual expense in financial terms but really: this is investment in the future potential of India)

On the back of our incredible and constantly learning journey so far, the way ahead is ambitious. We are just getting started, and think this is a great platform for us to build more.

We are keen to:

• Measure & deepen impact: Understand & build conviction in our work & become more data driven. Knowing fully well that measuring mindset shifts is non trivial??
• Institutionalise: Build systemic capabilities at all levels in Government systems and other partners to continue & improve the work?of enabling India to be entrepreneurial.
• Productise: so we can (1) think long term; (2) deepen customer(student & vyapari) focus; (3) compound learnings & experiment;??(4) Be more data driven
• Explore contributing to ecosystem level impact?
• Above all - stay focused on creating Impact @ Scale.

The journey of youth & nano-entrepreneurs becoming more entrepreneurial ... is finding a lot of resonance - and should hit escape velocity and become a national movement soon.

Personally, a lot of Udhyam's work feels like it is nearing the point where it will add more value to the country than my work at Flipkart, and I don't say this loosely - I think Flipkart's impact on India was HUGE!!

Happy Birthday Udhyam!!?

Here is a gift from Krishnan - a touching post on his journey from volunteer to co-founder.

p.s: Main Shayar to Nahi.... but this poem found its way through me on this occasion.

(We are hiring for multiple roles at Udhyam across Product, Govt partnerships, Curriculum, M&E - Please check out/refer folks)