Learning without Classrooms with Abhijit Sinha

Founder and CEO of Project DEFY Abhijit Sinha, talks about creating learning centers without teachers, raising funds, Building teams, Starting a social enterprise and defying conventional understanding of education.

Questions from the Episode

1. What is Project DEFY and who is it for? (02:06)
2. What is wrong with teachers driven education system? (03:57)
3. How is DEFY solving the problem of choice in existing education system? (06:50)
4. Have you ever been told kids are dumb and can’t make choices? (11:12)
5. Have students from your learning centers been able to earn a living after acquiring skills at the learning centers? (12:15)
6. How do you financially support Project DEFY? (17:03)
7. What were the major challenges in raising Funds for DEFY? (19:01)
8. How did you reach out to donors in Corporates for funding? (21:30)
9. How did you build your team? (29:19)
10. How do you decide what salaries to pay? (34:20)
11. How did you measure your progress? What were your feedback loops? (39:18)
12. How do you balance between standardizing your processes and allowing each nook to operate based on local conditions? (42:13)
13. Were there moments when you wanted quit DEFY and just go back to a regular Job? (45:26)
14. What kept you going despite all the lows in your journey (48:34)
15. Why did you move to the village (50:08)

3 Big Take aways from the episode

1. Your Team is your Feedback Loop – This was a jewel in the entire conversation. I have always believed your team is your greatest resource but I never thought of each member in my team as a powerful feedback loop. As Abhijit mentioned, bringing in people who give you uncluttered, hard headed feedback, offer solution and are also willing to execute those, can go a long way in building sustainable organizations in the long term.

2. It is important to find Donors to fund your social enterprise but it is equally important to ensure they don’t influence your core values and beliefs, let alone compromise on them. At Project DEFY, one of the core beliefs is you don’t have to be paid unfairly low just because you work in a social enterprise and no donors could dictate what they paid their employees.

3. Learning rooted in curiosity is far more powerful than learning rooted in curriculum. When you learn something to solve an immediate problem or fulfill an immediate need, you get immediate feedback. If what you are learning solves your problem, you retain and build on that solution. If it doesn’t, then may-be you are not learning well or you need a different solution. Well, You may ask, Itis possible to let every person decide what they want to learn when there are limited students but can you do this for all the kids in the world? Honestly, I don’t know! I’m just hopeful, with the increasing penetration of internet and availability of knowledge, this should be possible for a lot many kids in the times to come.

Resources Mentioned in the Episode

1. Project DEFY - https://projectdefy.org/
2. Kanthari Fellowship - https://www.kanthari.org/