Maintaining Momentum, Thinking Sustainability

Weekly Goals
Develop Curriculum for the week
Conduct training for rural BPO
Develop contacts for future contracts for BPO
Implement our first contract
Find entrepreneur to sustain business going forward

To introduce myself and my project, I am working at GDL to start a
rural Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company that will employ
women to perform digitization and data-entry work. I and a Piramal Foundation
Intern hope to use technology towards the empowerment of women in the region
and to leverage the latent talent in the “Indian within India.” For
the last six months I was in rural Maharashtra working to start a food
processing unit that employed 12 women; I am excited to now develop
this business that will use modern technology for livelihood, women’s
empowerment and development.

Training with the 10 women started about three weeks ago and we
continued the training this week. Training is 4 hours per day, with
2.5 hours dedicated to typing, 45 minutes to computer theory and 45 to
English. The 10 women who are undergoing training have come up to
speed quite quickly; the trainees are typing approximately 25 words a
minute with 95% accuracy. One of the bigger challenges has been to
develop other computer skills in the women, including copying and
pasting, saving files and using the mouse. My colleague has tried to implement
a couple of lesson plans to improve the women’s computer skills, but
building up the women’s capabilities has been an uphill battle. my colleague
and I plan to continue to develop more innovative and robust lesson
plans to impart strong computer skills. Getting the computer skills to
a higher level as soon as possible is extremely important as I have
procured a contract with the government of Rajasthan and another
contract from Jaipur which we are looking to implement by the end of
the year.

IN terms of sustaining this project, we have decided to help an
entrepreneur set up a rural BPO in Bagar and help him or her find
contracts, train the women and increase his entrepreneurial
capabilities. Towards this end, I have started to speak with local
business owners to gauge the interest of Bagar’s residents in starting
a rural BPO. It is great that we are starting this process so early,
but it is going it be a major challenge to build the capabilities of a
local entrepreneur and help them sustain the rural BPO enterprise once
I leave. A local computer training centre owner is interested in
sustaining the business going forward; I need to continue to work with
him to understand his vision and determine whether it lines up with
the vision of the rural BPO and of GDL as a whole.

Looking forward, I see the training of women to be a smaller piece of
my project with more time being spent on trying to find more contracts
and to build the capabilities of a local entrepreneur to sustain the
enterprise. It will be especially important for our BPO to implement
the first two contracts we have procured so that we can build our
brand and implement more contracts as soon as possible. Additionally,
I look forward to increasing the size of the BPO and working to start
other businesses in Bagar to increase employment opportunities,
increase wealth and implement technology-based solutions in Bagar.