Our journey in Armenia is coming to an end..

I can’t believe it’s over. After four weeks of intense efforts, today each sub-team in the SAP Social Sabbatical 2018 Armenia cohort gave their final presentations in front of our Pyxera representative, Tigran Sukiasyan (what a formidable, smart and wonderful resource we had in him!); Gabriele Hartmann, head of SAP Corporate Social Responsibility MEE, who came during this home stretch to support us and see all that we have done; and of course, our clients, who were there to accompany all of us during this last opportunity to share what we’ve done and what we’ve learned.

I have been working with the Teach for Armenia organization, whose stated mission is “To catalyze a nationwide movement of impact-driven leaders expanding educational opportunity to all children in Armenia”. Their flagship program is to place highly qualified university graduates as teaching fellows in Armenia’s most under-served communities.

As part of the Teach for All global network, whose core purpose is to ensure that all children have access to a quality education, Teach for Armenia was started five years ago by a young, visionary social entrepreneur, Larisa Hovannisian. In just her mid-twenties, she moved to Armenia after having completed her studies in the United States, as well as a two-year teaching fellowship for Teach for America. With little support in-country, Larisa persevered in her vision and placed 14 teaching fellows in under-served Armenian schools in 2014. Today in 2018, Teach for Armenia has placed 102 teaching fellows in six of the eleven Armenian provinces.

These teaching fellows are not only pouring their energies into the classroom but are also striving to make a positive impact in the communities. For example, we met Arusik, a phenomenal teaching fellow in the remote Lori region of Armenia. When she began her fellowship, she was disappointed in the run-down state of the school’s library. She wanted to provide the kids with a modern, well-equipped and welcoming communal space to learn and to enjoy reading. The school had no extra resources, and Arusik had no budget, but she was determined; so on her own she found a designer, and through her efforts she was able to raise the money needed to renovate the school library. The library remains open even when school is on break, so kids and their parents can congregate there together, reading and spending quality time with other community members.

This is an example of the visionary leadership Teach for Armenia is cultivating in their fellows; however, they are at a critical inflection point: they are a rapidly developing and talented organization, but to go to the next level, they need to adopt data-driven decision-making, so that they can track and analyze data coming from the classrooms and react swiftly to it. This would also allow them to share their successes with all current and future stakeholders. And this was our critical business challenge: to develop a framework that they can implement to take them to that next level in their journey towards country-wide educational excellence.

Back to our presentation today. We had already done the final hand-off this week with our client: going over all the business, functional and technical requirements as well as risks and resource planning and next steps, all included in the lengthy final report we prepared for them. Today was about sharing our personal journey with everyone in the room. How we felt coming to Armenia and helping our client tackle these challenges. Our fears coming into the Social Sabbatical, and also all of our inspirations during these four weeks. What it meant to us to be able to interview teaching fellows and principles of schools in economically disadvantaged areas of Armenia, and what we learned from them. We met people with incredible drive and perseverance, true leaders who are making do with very little but are able to create quite a lot of impact in the lives of the children in their classrooms as well as in the communities in which these kids live.

My sub-team colleagues, Unmesh Gandhi from Montreal, and Nikol Beringerova from Czech Republic, and I talked not only about what we were able to accomplish in four weeks under sometimes adverse conditions, but also about our personal learnings and what we will take back to our roles at SAP. I think it’s so important for the work, the knowledge and the personal sense of accomplishment to carry over as we go back to our “real lives”. Let this not be a surreal and interesting summer camp experience, but a continuation of something greater than ourselves — something of which we can not only feel proud but tangibly put to use — for ourselves and for SAP.