India: An Innovator in Every Household

In Telangana state in southern India, communities depend heavily on agriculture for livelihoods. For decades, young people have shared the responsibility of contributing to their family’s economic outputs, often through labour-intensive work.

Abhishek, Venu and Rajesh are three young innovators with a vision to alleviate the burdens of traditional farming practices after witnessing the toll on their communities, especially on girls and women. Long hours bent over in fields often result in severe physical strain and chronic back pain by the time they reach their thirties. Determined to make a difference, they created the Multi-purpose Bag for Agriculture (MBA). 

MBA allows farm workers to carry items and produce while distributing weight evenly across the body, minimizing the strain on their backs. It facilitates tasks like spraying fertilizers and seed-sowing limiting the physical strain. While similar products exist on the market, they're prohibitively expensive, placing them out of reach for many in economically fragile communities.

The group sought to overcome this barrier by creating an affordable alternative. Using readily available materials such as repurposed fertilizer bags, they developed a modular design that equips workers with a basic kit with the option to upgrade via added modules as needed. The result is a versatile tool with a production cost of under US$1, with the potential to expand up to $3 for a fully equipped unit. 

Their innovation was iterative. With support from UPSHIFT, UNICEF’s social innovator accelerator, Abhishek, Venu and Rajesh turned their idea into reality. In the first months alone, they produced 400 units of the MBA. Recognizing the value of their contribution, government authorities offered the UPSHIFTers a platform to present their idea to others in their village and further afield. 

The skills-building programme is shaped around a proven curriculum and core principles that allow fit-for-purpose adaptations to serve the needs of 4.1 million young people across 47 countries. In India, what started as a 60-student pilot has expanded to impact the lives of over 430,000 students across almost 19,000 schools in four states: Andhra, Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana, as well as through 10,000 tinkering labs across the country. 

Delivered in partnership with the state governments and schools, UPSHIFT emerged in 2021 as a tool to support the government’s New National Education Policy, which emphasized the need for students to learn and practice 21st-century skills.

“It is becoming increasingly critical that children not only learn, but that they learn to learn. Education must move less toward content and more toward learning how to think critically and solve problems, how to be creative and multidisciplinary, and how to innovate, adapt, and absorb new material in novel and changing fields”, says Jazreen Deboo, former Manager of Research and Impact at the National Skill Development Corporation.  

In India, UPSHIFT is delivered through UNISOLVE, a state-of-the-art digital platform meticulously designed to facilitate UPSHIFT delivery to secondary schools. The benefits of UPSHIFT powered by UNISOLVE are twofold. From an institutional standpoint, the platform reduces the time teachers require to support students in completing the UPSHIFT learning journey and the administrative and logistical requirements to participate.  For the UPSHIFTers, UNISOLVE combines the advantages of distance learning opportunities and face-to-face activities into a blended approach with a strong emphasis on experiential learning. The net result is that implementation costs are reduced by as much as 20 times compared to face-to-face delivery, paving the way for national scale.

UPSHIFT powered by UNISOLVE in India is delivered as an extracurricular school activity. School teachers are trained to be mentors and support children and young people in their journey to learn about innovation and entrepreneurship and apply those skills to create solutions to the societal challenges they care about. Following a 10-week learning journey of around 28 hours, UPSHIFTers enter a State Level Challenge in which they submit innovative solutions that will be evaluated and selected for novelty, usefulness, relevance and feasibility, among other criteria. Challenge winners like Abhishek, Venu and Rajesh receive seed funding and mentorship to develop their innovative solutions. 

A new generation of changemakers is rising in India —eager to forge a future honouring tradition while embracing innovation. Together with partners, UPSHIFT’s vision is to equip every student in India with the skills they need to create real and tangible change in their lives and communities – bringing the ‘one innovator per family’ vision to life.