Project Rajugela

About India School Fund:

The India School Fund (ISF) is a non-profit organization started by five Harvard Business School (HBS) students in 2005. ISF opened its first school in 2005 in Rajugela, Uttar Pradesh (UP) for more than 250 children. ISF's mission is to ensure effective delivery of education and drive entrepreneurship to break the vicious cycle of poverty in rural areas of India. The ISF aims at educating next generations in rural India to not only read, write and count but also to see and evolve in their environment in a spirit free of constraints and rich of cultural diversity. ISF creates talent markets around clusters of schools through leading teaching content and practices, community programs, and incentive systems which promote entrepreneurship and core-skills development such as:

•  Technical skills: Literacy-math-science, entrepreneurship, technical and vocational skills

•  Soft skills: communication, negotiation, critical and creative thinking

•  Life skills: health maintenance, resourcefulness, financial literacy

ISF believes that once equipped with these core skills, the people living in poor areas will develop self-confidence as well as the tools and relationships necessary to become to become entrepreneurs, employees or graduates from higher education .

Anand Charity at ISF

A landmark judgment of the Indian Supreme Court in 2002 called the “Right for Food Act” directed states to provide mid-day meals to every child. The state of UP has made very little progress towards this directive. Currently, due to lack of proper kitchen facilities, ISF provides the kids with a dry meal. This meal consists mainly of fruits, sprouts and biscuits.

The grant from Anand Charity will be used to create a kitchen facility at ISF's school in Rajugela and provide daily meals for 250 children. Daily nutritious meals have many benefits:

•  Provide incentive for the children – a good meal is a great incentive for children from low-income families to attend school

•  Improve the children's health in the long-term by improving their body mass index and providing vital vitamins/minerals

•  Increase the children's concentration during school hours

The kitchen will also be used as a meeting room for teachers and supervisors.

Anand Charity is funding 50% of the kitchen construction costs and 75% of the cost of providing daily meals for the children. The remaining costs will be borne by ISF.

Project Monitoring

• Local cooks will be responsible for cooking the food and serving it to the kids.
• The quality of the food will be checked by the principal and the village education committee (comprising of local village members) on a regular basis.
• Any complaint against the food quality shall be acted upon on an immediate basis.
• The school manager, Rahul, will be responsible for supervising the construction of the kitchen and hiring of the cooks. The ISF head in India shall be responsible for any other decision making in this matter.
• The school's annual budget will be used towards the regular maintenance of the kitchen.
• Daily attendance is monitored closely by teachers and the principal.
• During the summer of 2008, two Harvard interns took the Body Mass Index of each student. ISF will monitor the BMI closely to see if the daily meal has a direct effect on health.
• Anand Charity will issue the grant in three installments to ISF after evaluating the progress at each stage.

Please donate generously to this project here.