Skills
We teach narrow trades that need little equipment and have customers in an ordinary town. Small groups, working teachers, and a first sale or first client before anyone is called a graduate.
The first six courses
Eight weeks. Stitches, reading a pattern, finishing well. Then the part most courses leave out: costing your time, photographing the piece, listing it online and posting it to a buyer.
Ten weeks. Learners run real adverts with small real budgets for real local businesses: a clinic, a coaching centre, a sweet shop. They learn to write a page, read the numbers and report to a client.
Twelve weeks. Day books, invoices, bank reconciliation and GST returns on common software. Every market has traders who need this done each month.
Twelve weeks at a bench. Fault finding, screen and battery replacement, soldering, sourcing parts, pricing a job fairly.
Six weeks. Hand pumps, small motors, pipes, chlorine dosing and filter changes. Tied directly to our water projects.
Ten weeks of daily speaking practice, a written profile and mock interviews with people who hire.
How every course runs
No fee and no deposit. Materials and tools are lent or given.
Teachers are working practitioners. They are paid for their time.
Real work for real buyers during the course. We help find the first one.
We ask every graduate what they earned at three, six and twelve months, and publish the totals.
The evidence
Grouping children by what they can already do, instead of by age, raised test scores in six randomized evaluations across seven Indian states. The children furthest behind gained the most.
J-PAL, Teaching at the Right LevelIn a trial across rural India, more than 90 percent of households took up treated drinking water delivered to the home when the price was low, and kept using it for the length of the study.
University of Chicago, The Value of Clean WaterWomen in Delhi who were offered a subsidised stitching course were almost five percentage points more likely to be in work afterwards than women who were not. Finishing the course mattered most.
Learning and Earning, a randomized evaluation in IndiaGet involved
Astha is being built now. People who join in the first year shape what it becomes, and their names stay on the record of how it began.