Who you work with#
Dream a Dream, as described in Brief 01. This problem sits with the team that runs the Thriving Centres and decides who the centre should be reaching.
The situation#
A Thriving Centre sits in a neighbourhood. Within 8 to 10 kilometres of it there are young people who have left school, young people about to leave, employers, training institutes, clinics, libraries, sports grounds, self-help groups and small businesses. Some of that is recorded in census data, school records and government datasets. Most of it is in nobody’s records at all.
What is going wrong#
The centre reaches the young people who walk in. It does not know how many it is missing, or where they are. Outreach is guesswork.
The same blindness applies to what is around the centre. A tailoring unit two streets away that would take an apprentice, or a college with a free evening class, is invisible unless a staff member happens to know about it.
Why it is not fixed yet#
Indian secondary data on young people is patchy, out of date, and published at the wrong level. District figures do not tell you about one neighbourhood. School dropout data exists but is held by different departments in different formats. Mapping community assets by hand takes weeks per neighbourhood and goes stale.
Skills and Expertise#
- Branch — CS, IT. Strong fit for anyone interested in data science or geospatial work.
- Technical skills — Public data sourcing, geospatial analysis and mapping, estimation from incomplete data, data visualisation, survey design.
- Other skills — Judging source quality, stating uncertainty honestly, documenting a method someone else can repeat.