By Simon Kuany, Rajiv Ramaswamy, Saksham Pathak, Juhi Vajpayee, Payal Mulchandani, Sharon Weir
17 October 2018
The Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace (MGIEP) and Sustainable Development, UNESCO’s category-1 research institute, has been working on a youth-led, technology-enabled, crowdsourced Global Monitoring Framework for any community-centered issue and learning (which can also be in line with any of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals). The project, which aligns with the ‘Rethinking Youth’ programme at MGIEP, is in partnership with 4th Wheel Social Impact, a youth-led organization working towards strategizing, monitoring and evaluating social programs across India. This is also a collaborative effort with the T-Learning network, a collective of initiatives world-wide exploring the modes of learning for sustainability.
The project implementation is structured in three phases: Phase 1 involved understanding the existing context; Phase 2 consisted of consultations and workshops for a preliminary data collection to understand the population and community issues; and Phase 3 involved using the insights gained to build a technological platform (or app) for sustained monitoring and learning. Phases 1 and 2 are complete and phase 3 is currently underway.
A total of 15 workshops and consultations were held in the two cities of Bhuj and Gandhidham and were attended by around 1,800 youth from 3 schools and 5 colleges along with senior education stakeholders. The 7 activities co-curated and implemented at these workshops spanned a contextual understanding of aspects of social development, participatory methods asking youth to identify issues in the education system (with a hypothetical budget of INR 10,000 to invest on the three most important issues), and stakeholders and power dynamics. They activities were aimed at gauging issues that young people and other stakeholders care about, as well as deploying youth-led technological mechanisms to collectively act and monitor social change and learning around such Issues.
The remaining part of this article will be devoted to the nuances and other details of the consultations and workshops.
Kutch: An OverviewLocated in the heart of the Kutch district of Gujarat in North-Western India, the desert city of Bhuj and its nearby villages are known for its rich culture demonstrated through the craftsmanship and local Gujarati cuisine. Many communities, specifically the women, rely on craftwork like bandhani (a local tie-dye technique), mirror and embroidery work and batik printing for sustenance. While the official language of Kutch is Gujarati, the indigenous population prefer to interact in the local Kutchchi dialect of Gujarati. In the earthquake of 2001 that left thousands dead and hundreds of buildings demolished, the city of Bhuj was shaken to its roots. Despite the disastrous calamity however, through communal participation, a complete city rehabilitation took place where its people managed to overcome and move ahead towards progress together. Communal harmony and participation has been one of the defining traits of the entire Kutch district – not just Bhuj but even the neighbouring city of Gandhidham which was established in the 1950s after the partition of India (formation of Pakistan) for the Sindh refugees and named after the ‘father of the nation’, Mahatma Gandhi.
With this spirit of an active and united community, the project to implement the issue-identification pilot project to track and monitor community-centred issues within and beyond the framework of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and most importantly, community learning around such issues using technology for social change was Initiated with the youth of Kutch.
The underlying premise of the project is to provide a technological tool to monitor community action and learning around community-centred issues. Though the current focus is education (Goal 4, 4.7 in UN lexicon), the tool should be able to aide community monitoring on any issue. In order to ensure that all community members gain the nece