Amal Mega Project — Update
It’s been a couple of months since I joined Amal Academy for my personal and professional growth. For the last 3–4 weeks, my team and I have been working on a social problem as part of our learning. In this blog, I’ll be updating you about our progress as a team.
There were multiple ideas we aimed to work on, and we conducted several brainstorming sessions to finalize our idea and be as specific as possible. We were inclined to work with orphanages or old age homes due to our sympathy for them. We also wanted to address a specific problem faced by Pakistan as a nation. So, here is what we came up with: we will be educating children in orphanages on basic computer skills to make them digitally literate.
Before moving forward, let’s understand what digital literacy is. According to Wikipedia, digital literacy is an individual’s ability to find, evaluate, and communicate information using typing or digital media platforms. The three main steps a person should be able to perform to be categorized as digitally literate are: finding and consuming digital content, creating digital content, and sharing and communicating it effectively. Although this topic has been emphasized a lot, Pakistan is still lagging far behind the rest of the world.
According to research conducted by MMID, only 3% of women in Pakistan can copy or move a file on a computer, considered as the bare minimum for digital literacy. This figure is alarming when compared to the rest of the world. Possible root causes of this problem include the outdated curriculum in the government sector of education, while the private sector may be changing their way of educating, they are inaccessible to the majority of the population due to high costs. The lower middle-class and lower-class population are the most affected as they don’t have enough resources to afford private sector education, and they are not getting proper guidance about the digital world in the government sector. This can be further categorized at the provincial level. In Punjab, there has been a lot of improvement in the education sector in the past few years, but if we compare it to Baluchistan or Sindh, they are far behind.
By not getting enough knowledge of the digital world, students lose a fine number of opportunities to earn. For example, if we talk specifically about Excel expertise, which is a data analysis and visualization tool built by Microsoft, there are only 455 active gigs on Fiverr, a leading freelancing platform, from Pakistan. This number is far behind when compared to the outside world.
Keeping in view all these points, we have decided to teach children in orphanages the skills of Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint so they can familiarize themselves with the basic usage of the computer and how they can open doors to gaining monetary benefits from these skills. Apart from that, we will also make them aware of the rising Artificial Intelligence, like the evolution of large language models like ChatGPT, and how they can benefit from this.
For this, we have chosen Sweet Care Home, an orphanage located in Model Town Lahore, to carry out all these activities. There are about 30 children being taken care of there. We will be targeting children with age 10 plus for this project. The administration of the orphanage is willing to cooperate with us and give their children a learning advantage.
Although this solution cannot be adapted on a large scale, to go to different schools or organizations like orphanages and teach them these skills. We also need to raise awareness of this issue so that children or teenagers themselves take interest in these kinds of opportunities. For that, we will be carrying out an awareness campaign on different social media platforms using our social media accounts. Still unsure of how many targeted people can we reach, but we will give it a go.
To select a specific orphanage, we conducted thorough research online. We gathered data on different orphanages from Google Maps and called them one by one to propose our idea and listen to what they can offer. Most of the orphanages were not willing to carry out this project, due to different reasons like unavailability of time due to the busy schedule of children, demographics of children who are not old enough to learn these skills. The caretaker of Sweet Care Home was more than excited to work with us.
Apart from educating the children, we will also be communicating with different NGOs to raise funds, which we can utilize to purchase at least a couple of computer systems for the orphanage for the usage of the children so that they can keep practicing and exploring. To take up our action plan, we will be conducting two sessions per week to educate the children and at the end of the 4-week program, we will conduct an exam to evaluate the learning of the students and appreciate the top performers. Currently, we are defining the topics which we need to cover in the sessions, sort of curriculum design.
As we move forward, we’re excited to see the impact of our efforts and hope that, in a small way, we can contribute to positive change for these children and for our country.
