That is the good news. The bad news is that without access to computers and the internet the poor become even more marginalized. In a world where technology has become one of the most powerful tools to attain global prosperity, its proliferation has been limited to the more affluent parts of the world. And, as the digital divide has widened, so have inequalities in economic opportunity.

The Digital Equalizer Program is striving to ensure that Raju’s spirit stays alive.

In India less than one percent of the population owns a personal computer, and just over one percent uses the Internet. The Digital Equalizer (DE) Program helps in preparing children ages 10-15 to enter an information age so they can participate in creating their own future. (6)

DE program operates by establishing computer/internet centers in underprivileged schools and providing operational and management support for three years. The goal is to have the center become self-sustaining by allowing fee-based usage of the equipment during after-school hours. Entrepreneurial teachers can develop materials for fee-based usage or for use in the school system. DE centers cost $7000 for the initial set up; this includes hardware, software, connectivity and teacher training. The only permanent staff is regional directors – appointed on as needed basis as the program scales in different regions. DE Program started in 2001 as Schools On-line with 45 schools, became independent in 2002 with 51 schools; added content rich curriculum in 2003. (7) There are plans to reduce pilot costs by using a replicable model by 2007 with a goal to achieve self-sustenance in 2008. (8)

In early 2005, DE achieved a significant milestone: the first group of DE centers became independent and self-sustaining. Shobha Murthy and Usha Rani, teachers at the Madapati Hanumath Rao Girls High School in Hyderabad made their school the first to achieve financial self-sustenance after three years of support.

With this proof of concept, the DE program is starting to attract the attention of state governments in India. In 2005, DE management partnered with Punjab Government to help launch 1,300 schools in the state of Punjab.

Such a partnership and subsequent scale-up of the model would not have been possible without DE’s social mission of providing education to children from underserved areas because the schools in such areas are run by the state, the teachers that DE trains are state employees and hence active involvement of the school administration as well as the community requires no additional investment in infrastructure from the DE program. Regular for profit educational institutions have not been able to create a successful operating model for these communities where infrastructure is non-existent or poor. The DE business model is closer to venture capital funded entrepreneurial startups where a handoff or partnership is the metric of success.

DE management plans to leverage this success to attract other state governments to fund new DE centers while core investment is shifted to develop appropriate language content for different regions. The DE program expects a 200% CAGR because of its ability to attract government partners even while reducing its own investment in setting up the DE centers 90-95%.

A social mission as strategy has been successful for DE as reflected in their ability to scale rapidly once the basic delivery model was shown to work. Hence they now have a model which is called large scale partnership model:

• Based on successful demonstration of prototype, engage the local government and community to elicit capital and resources for scaling and capacity building


• DE Provides monitoring, training and assessment

DE plans to build program awareness in US and India by creating marketing and brand materials in 2006-2007 in order to attract more partners and scale with no added DE investment.

Video and Illiteracy: Innovation in Media

More media will be created in the next 4 years than in the last 40,000 years combined and most of it will be multimedia, concludes a UC Berkeley study (9). As with any change there comes the bad along with the good. The jury is still out on the current phenomenon of media explosion. Old fashioned text competes with slick multimedia productions for attention and amusement. How then to keep kids in school? Especially at-risk urban youth?