We are in the midst of a global learning crisis—by 2030, 825 million children may lack basic secondary-level skills, while millions already in classrooms struggle with foundational learning. In underserved communities, education is often limited to rote methods, with little access to STEAM, problem-solving, or leadership development. Girls face even fewer opportunities, reinforcing inequities and cycles of poverty.
Enabling Leadership Build (EL Build) addresses this gap by transforming classrooms into spaces of active, experiential learning. Using hands-on LEGO-based challenges, children work in mixed-gender teams to solve real-world problems. This approach develops scientific thinking, creativity, collaboration, and leadership skills essential for the future.
The program creates equal opportunities for girls to lead, explore & contribute. By engaging in solving real-world community challenges to become active problem-solvers. In the process they build not only scientific thinking, but also collaboration, resilience & strong sense of agency.
At the same time, EL Build is designed to be sustainable and scalable. By repurposing donated Lego type building blocks kits from across the world. Ensures high-quality learning resources in low-resource settings while promoting reuse, cost-effectiveness, and local ownership. This makes the program not just impactful but highly scalable enabling to reach and empower thousands more children to break barriers and defy the impossible.
Walk into an Enabling Leadership Build (EL Build) classroom, and you won’t see passive learning—you will see energy, curiosity, and transformation in motion. Children from underserved schools work in mixed-gender teams, debating ideas, sketching solutions, and building models with Lego type building blocks.. Structures collapse, mechanisms fail—but instead of stopping, students redesign, rebuild, and try again. This cycle—imagine, build, test, fail, improve—is at the heart of learning. EL Build is a three-year, in-school program (Grades 6–8) with 48 sessions annually, designed to move students from exploration to application:
In Level 1, students explore creativity and basic engineering concepts through guided play.
In Level 2, they take on structured challenges using LEGO Technic, learning stability, motion, and design thinking.
In Level 3, students design advanced builds, applying concepts independently to solve complex challenges.
By Grade 9, students take on capstone projects, becoming problem-solvers addressing real challenges.
The real shift is deeper. EL Build creates spaces where girls lead with confidence, while boys learn collaboration and respect. In 2024–25, 1,500+ students participated (47% girls), with 97.2% of schools reporting academic improvement and 61.4% showing life skills gains. What emerges is a generation that thinks critically and applies learning to shape real-world solutions.
EL Build began as a pilot in 2016 with 200 children and scaled in 2017. Today, it operates across 20+ government and low-income schools in Dharwad, Bengaluru, and Pune in India, and in Battambang, Cambodia—reaching 1,500+ students annually and over 6,000 children cumulatively. The program is implemented in close partnership with school leadership and local authorities, ensuring strong on-ground support and sustained impact within school systems.
Scalability is driven by a robust, thoughtfully designed model. A standardized yet adaptable curriculum, combined with a train-the-trainer (apprenticeship) approach, enables local youth to become facilitators—reducing costs while building community ownership and continuity. This is further strengthened by EL Navigator, our in-house tech platform that ensures curriculum fidelity, real-time monitoring, and data-driven decision-making.
Sustainability is embedded through the use of donated LEGO type building block kits sourced globally, ensuring access to high-quality learning tools in low-resource settings while promoting reuse and long-term ownership.
Quality and transparency remain central. Strong systems, continuous training, and rigorous monitoring ensure consistency and accountability across all sites. Built on design thinking—imagine, build, test, iterate—EL Build proves that experiential STEAM learning can scale to thousands without compromising impact.
EL Build has continuously evolved to remain relevant, future-ready, and deeply impactful for children in underserved communities. A key enhancement is the integration of LEGO SPIKE Prime kits, enabling senior students to engage in robotics, coding, and systems thinking. Students now move beyond basic building to designing sensor-based prototypes, applying engineering concepts to real-world challenges. Through this process, they simultaneously develop critical life skills such as problem-solving, teamwork, resilience, communication, and self-confidence, making learning both practical and transformative.
We have also introduced a community-based capstone model in Grade 9. After three years of foundational learning, students apply their skills to address real community challenges—such as sustainability, awareness, and local issues—by designing and implementing solutions in teams. This bridges classroom learning with real-world impact, strengthening leadership, empathy, and purpose.
Inspired by minimal invasive learning, facilitators act as enablers—guiding through questions rather than instruction—fostering ownership and independent thinking.
These enhancements ensure EL Build remains a dynamic, design-led innovation that equips children to learn, lead, and solve real-world problems.
Begin by securing the required government permissions to implement the program in your geography. Identify and onboard at least four suitable schools—serving under-resourced communities, with supportive leadership and a minimum of 20 students in Grade 6, ensuring gender balance.
Once schools are finalized, our team partners closely with you to plan implementation—conducting orientations, training facilitators, and contextualizing the curriculum. Sessions are delivered through hands-on, team-based learning using Lego type building blocks kits. Each session intentionally ends with reflection, where students examine what worked, what didn’t, and what they learned, building ownership of the process.
As students grow in confidence, challenges progressively increase in complexity beginning with basic building concepts, then move to sensors and more advanced mechanical problem-solving challenges over time. Continuous observation, adaptation, and documentation create a strong feedback loop, ensuring quality, demonstrating impact, and enabling effective scaling.
