Sananda Mane, a Post Graduate Masters in Economics graduate from Columbia University, USA, and a former United Nations Development Programme Development officer speaks exclusively to Neshwin Almeida about an innovative free 3 year Lend a Hand Programme started in 4 areas across Goa.
Could you tell us more about the Lend-A-Hand programme?
Ms Mane: In Goa we are present in four areas - in Ibramhpur, Kavlem, Mashem and Neura. Basically we approach schools and are selected through voluntary adoption. The programme is for high school students and addresses issues related to gender, wherein we try to teach kids that is not only the boy who should deal with money or accounts, or that the girl child is not supposed to be trained in livelihood skills like carpentry, electrical wiring. The training is free of cost and purely voluntary.
How is all this relevant in today’s education structure?
Ms Mane: The problem with today’s education structure is that it is only certificate oriented and only helps in deciding whether students should opt for arts, commerce or science at higher secondary level. We need education to help students or rather to train youngsters to create livelihoods and get jobs. Our courses challenge the roto learning methodology.
How does Lend-a-Hand challenge the roto method of learning?
Ms Mane: Basically ours is a three year course, once a week in the schools we tie-up with. We have four main subjects that include 1) Basic Engineering that teaches student’s geometry related skills, 2) Energy and Environment, 3) Agriculture and Animal Husbandry and the last module is Home and Health that covers health issues for which the students need to know the causes and not the effects of the health problems. Students have to deliver in Lend-a-Hand through twenty-five different projects in the three years.
So basically you teach school going kids, rural occupations?
Ms Mane: No, our programme is not aimed to make kids into farmers, masons or carpenters. But its activities like drip irrigation and agriculture that helps these kids think of becoming agricultural scientist or banking experts who know to read through agriculture loans. Basic engineering makes our students both boys and girls to understand 3-dimensional designs, fabrications, electrical wiring, carpentry and wood qualities, financial feasibility of projects, measurement; while energy makes our students understand maintenance and repairs or installations of solar panels, manufacturing solar batteries and these are upcoming industries that will benefit these students.
What inspires you to take up such projects?
Ms Mane: I have been a development officer for seventeen years as a State Director for Care International and later after my Masters in Economics at Columbia University, I was an International Consultant for UNDP and World Bank. Now with Lend-a-Hand India, we have given kids a multi skilled exposure compared to technical schools that give students a single exposure. In operation in Maharashtra for 6 years and with three batches of students passing out of our programme, we have created success stories of school dropouts and back benchers. In Goa similarly, we want kids especially in rural areas not to get lured to the lower rung jobs of drivers and truck owners in the mining industry but be involved in the technical side of mining, be experts in the pharma industry rather than packaging employees.
We want kids to be unique so that we get a special reservation into IITs for kids enrolled with Lend-a-Hand. Our three years programme at high school level is not just a memory test but teaches true work culture and how to work in teams.
