June’s the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

I was talking to a friend about when he would be returning to his place of work. He quickly replied, just after the third wave. It seems the way we measure time has changed. Before Corona, pre-wave 1, post wave 2 …

As it seems that things are getting better with respect to the second wave of Covid in India, it only remains to be seen the damage that it has unleashed — medically, financially and emotionally — all while the third wave may be around.

It can only be reiterated again and again, how there’s a stronger need for all of us to come together and support each other. Alone we can only walk little. It feels warm to be supported by 6 State Governments, more than 30 admission partners who together helped more than 40 women to join in the last two months, and 50+ women who have already booked tickets to join within the next 30 days.

The Good

• 7 girls from Tripura and 2 from Sikkim are joining campus soon. This adds to more than 20 states including Kashmir that are already represented on the campus.
• We started few pilot batches of typing courses and spoken English on Meraki. Students can simply buy a simple USB keyboard and an OTG cable (total costs less than 150 INR) and learn to type from their phone directly.
• We have finally started our one-year residential course in Design in Pune.
• We are on the path to open at least two more campuses this year, leapfrogging to 1000 students capacity by the end of the year. Both of these would be in partnerships with the State Governments.
• We have been able to design policies for critical internal functions for teams as well as students. We would soon make them publicly available.
• We have launched dashboards for our donors, partners to monitor the progress of the students. We continue to work on dashboards to make them more useful as well as easy to understand.
• Our strategy of quarantining and isolating on any outside contact seems to be working for all our campuses. Despite the two waves, all the campuses were well protected.
• We are hiring for “Code India Fellows” — a unique program to place coders in government colleges towards improving employability outcomes.

The Bad

• There was an incident in the Pune campus post in which we had to tighten our security. We were asked to come up with clearer policies on how do we make decisions related to students. It helped us to understand the need to standardise as we scale.
• There were infrastructural issues in the Pune campus due to weather conditions and scarcity of water.
• We are behind our targets in our online courses as most of our partners who support us in mobilisation couldn’t be active in the second wave.

Help

• Recommend potential candidates for “Code India Fellowship”.
• Try our online application — Meraki and share your feedback on how we can make it better for you to use the same with students that you work with.