Shravan Kumar is the co-founder of i-Saksham Education and Learning Foundation, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to improving access to quality education in the Naxal-affected districts of Bihar. i-Saksham engages rural youth as community education leaders. Shravan is also an Acumen Fellow and a Prime Minister Rural Development Fellow, with four years of experience in the microfinance sector at Samhita and SKS Microfinance Limited. He holds an MBA in Agribusiness from Symbiosis, Pune, and a BSc (Agriculture) from BHU, Varanasi.

Excerpt:

“Throughout our intervention, we ignored the role of a teacher, believing we could circumvent them and link students to what mattered the most—a good content platform. This was our biggest failure. We failed to build on the possibility of bringing teachers and technology together. Doing so would have allowed the teacher to use EdTech as a powerful tool to expand their capabilities, and envision a learning ecosystem that breaks the limitation of textbooks or other resource constraints, creating endless possibilities.

We believe the power of EdTech lies in creating and expanding these possibilities, not only for the students or the teacher, but for all stakeholders. This is possible only when stakeholders have a stake and a voice in the intervention design.”

—

Read more:

1. Read Shravan’s story on Failure Files.
2. Read more failure stories on Failure Files.
3. Check out some ideas and tools from Fail Forward to help your organisation take risks, learn, adapt, and fail intelligently.
4. Understand why the social sector must recognise and talk about failure.
5. Learn why talking about failure is crucial for growth.

Want to share your failure story? Learn more about what we’re looking for here, and share your pitch/story on writetous@staging.idronline.org