During the past few days we have spent more time with the women working in our social business and with the women who are members of Prayas’s self help groups located throughout the slums of Delhi. Yesterday we also had the opportunity to meet with Mr. Kohli, director at Vidya Sankar. These interactions helped refine our goals for the future.

At our meeting with Mr. Kohli, we discussed how we can make our educational and vocational training more impactful by focusing on service jobs that are in high demand, such as plumbers, carpenters and electricians. By focusing on jobs like these, the students not only have a higher probability of being employed but they on average earn more than their peers who have nontechnical college degrees. Another way we can help increase the success of our students is to offer classes on basic skills we take for granted, like the importance of personal appearance and language skills. We also continued to discuss the hardships we will face with our center, including how to motivate children in the slums to become educated.

We are going to start importing bags from our social business into the United States in order to increase sales and be able to employ more women. While the bags will still be sold in India, we believe that as University of Florida students we can add much more value selling the bags in the US rather than in India where a Prayas employee is better suited for the job.

We are starting to realize how accustomed we are to life in Delhi after only 8 days. All we could do is laugh when our drive to Vidya Sankar school took 3 hours instead of the estimated 1 hour in a car with no A/C while temperatures outside hit 115 degrees.