Equipping youth with skills: Divya Jain

Divya Jain, Founder & CEO, Safeducate has been honoured with the Young Woman Achiever Award at the ASEAN Awards in February. This award was bestowed upon her by the Minister of External Affairs, Sushma Swaraj at the recently concluded ASEAN Summit held in New Delhi, in the presence of leaders of ASEAN countries. Divya shares about her stint with Safeducate, challenges and future plans… 

Excerpts:

Tell us about Safeducate?
About 11 years ago, I set up Safeducate and today we have 57 schools across the country to train students chosen from different villages and small towns to join the sector.  At that period skill development existed only in dilapidated government polytechnics and new industries like logistics had yet not recognised the importance of trained manpower. While researching for my book on trucking; ‘Horn Please’, I realised that the drivers, as well as the rest of the workforce in the industry, had no formal training and no real growth prospects.

I reached out to government bodies and partnered with the still nascent, National Skill Development Corporation to create a logistics skill council to lay down standards and career paths for the sector. Safeducate was one of the first companies to initiate training and skilling initiatives, which have now been recognised as extremely crucial by all stalwarts of the industry. It has been a roller-coaster ride since then as we continue to grow phenomenally month on month and expanding to fill in the need that so direly exists in the current education system.

What were the challenges that you came up while starting Safeducate?
The biggest challenge was that it was a really different concept. People I feel understand the idea of a college or a university or even a school, but vocational education and that too based out of schools made of containers and in the field of supply chain and logistics was too foreign a concept. Also, since the industry was so unorganised, the value of certification and training itself was a massive question mark. 

The first few years we had to spend trying to make people understand how this actually changes the way they did business or how they run their warehouses. Education is a long-term process and the returns come over years, not a few months. Also, convincing people to join this field was a massive challenge, as they don’t really understand what the industry is about. 

We commissioned and created documentary videos to try and explain in the villages, colleges, to explain what this industry is about. In the village, we would go set up ‘muradi’s and perform street plays and ‘nautankis’. It’s been an interesting journey, to say the least. Also harrowing was understanding the government machinery and the extremely complicated skill development landscape.

What do you aim to do further as Safeducate?
We are planning to skill and train a million people over the next 10 years through its 57 institutes set up across India.  We are working on ed tech products to scale skilling beyond the current brick and mortar training model. AI and VR, I feel, will get a massive transformation in education as we know of it and 
we will on the forefront leading this revolution. 

Also, I would hope to have a Safeducate institute in every district of the country.