EP 236 . 30 Mar 22

Happy Horizons Trust

With Kshitiz Anand

In the episode

  1. I would like to start with a very meta question since you have faced diverse users at scale. What does design mean to you and how has it changed overtime. Especially after HHT and looking at rural India?
  2. What is Happy Horizons? Why is it a trust?
  3. What made you think of building Happy Horizons? Why in rural India?
  4. Tell us about the real India which is far from 10 minutes delivery startups?
  5. Can you share few details of the initiatives within HH, like Project Jagriti or Jigyasa and few others? What is READY program? (Rethinking Education and Development of Youth program)
  6. A lot of stress is given on “activity” at HHT. You also speak about Entity Theorists (ET) and Incremental Theorist (IT). Please tell us more about it.
  7. Go wide, think big and lateral and then converge. Get uncomfortably narrow for focus and scope. This is a classic thought from design thinking or systems thinking. How do you implement in education and other projects done by HHT?
  8. What are the big challenges you face in running this? Government support, teachers, parents not sending children to schools or simply the infrastructure to run it?
  9. I am not going to ask “how do you make time for this”, I understand it’s about priority in your life. So what are the top 3 priorities for HH and why? How do you see them actioned in the coning time?
  10. One last personal question. Your investment or engagement seem to be for a different India with soochak, HHT and other initiatives. What does your designer within tell you and keep you motivated with these projects?

About Kshitiz Anand

In the age of 10 minutes delivery, our today’s guest is working on 10 years or may be more time to deliver. We have Kshitiz Anand with us on Audiogyan. He wears many hats.

 

On professional front, he works at Paytm as Associate Vice President-Design. He is an investor and founder of Soochak, an EdTech startup. He also co-founded Karekeba Ventures along with a few others to invest in the startup ecosystem in Bihar. He also has a cohort based course on System thinking for product builders

 

On personal front, he is an educator and has been teaching in multiple colleges and school. But over and above, today we are here to discuss a case study which i am very curious about. Happy Horizons. Kshitiz is the chairman of board at Happy Horizons Trust. It engages in Design Thinking, Participatory Learning, Community-based learnings and alternative education interventions to improve the quality of school education in India. Currently the 40 people organisation works with 75 schools in Rural Bihar, outreaching to approximately 35000 students.

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