India’s youth instead of pursuing their true potential spend most of their lives preparing for competitive examinations with selection rates of less than 1%. Less than 10% of India’s workforce is in salaried jobs & with AI & Automation, formal jobs are not expected to grow much. The Indian education system prepares learners with outdated rote learning abilities to compete for these few jobs. This leads to high inequity and limited pathways for growth. According to the Economic Survey of India, only 51% of Indian graduates job-ready in employability crisis.
This innovation was created for youth from underserved communities to be more agentic and economically productive, fostering their agency and potential. Udhyam’s Shiksha program nurtures entrepreneurial mindsets and 21st-century skills among youth through immersive, real-world learning experiences
Udhyam Shiksha fosters entrepreneurial mindsets in youth through a 4-year curriculum facilitated by teachers at scale in government schools. Each year offers a unique real world project opportunity to students.
Across all grades, students select project ideas based on their interests and contextually relevant opportunities. These projects are aligned towards social innovation, community concerns or local economic challenges.
All entrepreneurial projects are done in teams with robust real world engagement. Students conduct local need assessment, market research, build prototypes, interview customers, speak with mentors, take expert guidance, and present their solutions.
Throughout their learning journey, students consistently reflect on their mindsets and competencies in collaboration with each other.
These projects are accomplished using minimal resources and technology to prepare students for the out of class real world actions.
Over the last 7 years our programme has seen increasing interest and adoption by governments, educators and other non profits.
Till date, Udhyam Shiksha has empowered 3.7million learners, and enabled over 40,000 educators across more than 10,000 government schools and ITIs across 12 states in India.
Entrepreneurship mentors and institutional volunteers across India play a pivotal role in students’ journeys. Our alumni have formed a student-led community named Sarvo Udhyam to encourage other young entrepreneurs. Funders and successful entrepreneurs are also contributing to this journey financially.
Researchers from McGill University have established a lab in collaboration with Udhyam to understand youth agency and entrepreneurial mindsets more deeply in India. Findings of this longitudinal research will be used for policy reforms.
Over the next 3 years, Udhyam Shiksha aspires to establish at least 4 Exemplar State programs, which serve as Role Model State Implementations of our program combining Impact with Scale. These exemplar models will serve as a blueprint for a Pan India rollout and replication, combining robust process driven execution, deep institutional capability building, and data dashboards for effective near real time decision making. Achieving the above over the next 3 years, will take us closer to our mission of ‘Making Bharat Entrepreneurial’.
- Udhyam Shiksha's alumni have created Sarvoudhyam, a community of, by, and for young entrepreneurs that help budding young entrepreneurs aged between 18 to 25 years to create sustainable and profitable enterprises.
Established in 2024, Sarvoudhyam mentors over 83 young enterprises already, and, with continued support from Udhyam Shiksha, hopes to roll out chapters at a national level.
- Udhyam is leveraging AI and data-driven dashboards to enhance program delivery, including launching an AI assistant bot in Delhi to help students with social and business innovation projects and starting to use AI to assess student submissions at scale.
- Udhyam Shiksha partnered with Dr. Joseph Levitan, Associate Dean, Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University for a longitudinal study to assess the impact of the Entrepreneurial Mindsets Curriculum. Youth Agency and Learning Lab has been established under this partnership to co-create research frameworks and tools to entrepreneurial mindsets and competencies relevant to the context of India and other developing countries.
Using participatory approach and design, the study aims to dive deep into experiences of students for 12 years from the age of 13 till 25 years as they go on to pursue their life goals and make crucial decisions about their careers after school.
Our curriculum, implementation process and MEL documents are all open source and have been adopted by 4+ organisations already. We encourage educators to read through those documents and reach out to us at shyam@udhyam.org. We engage with our ecosystems intently to help adapt our programme to their contextual needs. We fully assist in co-creating, piloting and implementing the programme.
