Shaktipreneur in Spotlight: Alokit

The contribution of school leaders is crucial in influencing the development of students, but they seldom get opportunities for professional development. Alokit empowers school leaders and education officers through training and coaching to improve the outcomes of students from under-resourced communities.

”At Alokit, we envision every child learning in high-quality schools led by empowered leaders,” explains Manvi Arora, Shaktipreneur in Spotlight and Co-Founder of Alokit.

The Inspiration behind Alokit

Manvi took a 2-year break from her corporate career as a Programmer to volunteer with Teach for India(TFI) in 2013. She taught 60 Grade-1 students in her first year. It was not an easy task for her to manage the students, but her school leader coached and helped her improve. That aided Manvi in building a strong bond with her students and resulted in good class performance.

”The consistent mentorship and feedback from my school leader made me realize the importance of a supportive school leader in creating a positive school culture and ensuring improvement in school outcomes,” she says.

Manvi worked for 5 years with ISLI(India School Leadership Institute), where she met 2000+ school leaders coming from different Indian states, which reinforced her belief in the power of trained school teachers. After the sudden shutting of ISLI’s operations, Manvi experimented and explored volunteering and freelancing with various organizations and governments.

“I realized that I needed to be the owner and not the contributor to create a sustainable change,” she adds.

Arora’s belief in the cause, her passion to create sustainable impact, and her friendship with her co-founders motivated her to co-found Alokit.

Alokit: The Name:

The literal meaning of “Alokit” is” to get light”. The name showcased the impact of the light of the school leader’s knowledge that can dispel ignorance and give renewed energy and purpose to the stakeholders.

”When a teacher, staff member, student, parent or community member is working with an effective school leader, they start growing in their roles,” Manvi believes.

Journey as an entrepreneur:

Alokit conducts workshops and leadership retreats focused on the ‘Education Leadership Framework’ inclusive of Personal Leadership, Strategic Leadership, Academic Leadership, and People Leadership. They provide in-person support, enabling school leaders to implement their learnings from the workshops. Alokit also supports their partners and governments in their leadership recruitment and designing their leadership pipeline and ongoing professional development programs.

As a covid-born organization, it was a difficult start as they had to navigate the challenges of a young entrepreneur and ensure that the organization moved forward and created a sustainable impact. 

“My entrepreneurial journey has been a rollercoaster ride,” Manvi quips.” “The learnings have been huge in terms of managing divergent verticals, building a robust organization, engaging in different partnerships, raising funds, and making a name for ourselves.”

The team:

The three experienced co-founders of Alokit lead different verticals. As all of them are teachers, they have direct experience of teaching children from low-income backgrounds in urban slums and school leaders’ training and development. They have expertise in designing and implementing large-scale training programs for school principals, developing monitoring and evaluation tools to track teacher performance and student growth. 

“We have known each other since 2013 and also share a great personal bond which makes it easier for us to work together as co-founders with a collective vision of making Alokit a success.” Arora feels.

Impact of covid:

Alokit was set up in 2020, just when the pandemic had hit India. Some of its engagements with the government partners paused due to the pandemic. But they pivoted early to ensure they were able to support school leaders across India in subsequent months.

Some of the steps taken were:

• Running virtual (blended) programs: Alokit ran fully virtual programs with school leaders, and they were a great success as compared to the in-person programs that were held by ISLI. Both attendance (>90%) and program rating (5.5 on a scale of 6)were high.
•  Expansion and reach: The virtual nature of their program enabled them to reach more states (9) than what they had envisioned earlier (1) as geographic barriers fell. Alokit launched a program for affordable private school leaders from 5 states in 2020 that were struggling to keep their schools afloat during the pandemic.

“This new workstream emerged for us due to the pandemic,” Manvi adds.

Major learnings from covid:

i) Blended learning makes programs are cost-effective as well as ensures high uptake by school leaders

ii) All the major program components (training, coaching, and creating a community of school leaders) can be transferred seamlessly from in-person to virtual mode. 

iii) Creating theme-based products allows school leaders to aspire for some short-term goals and increases their motivation to perform as compared to the planned generic long-term program. 

iv) In Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, they realized the importance of investing in the supervisors of school leaders to ensure alignment within the system. 

v) Keeping students and school leaders’ needs at the centre of the program is a key to its success.

“We plan to incorporate all our learnings into our future programs to increase their effectiveness,” Arora says optimistically. 

Future Plans:

Manvi is clear about her plans for the coming year.

•  Impact 400,000 students by working with 1000 school leaders
•  Support 100 school leaders from affordable private schools to ensure effective school reopening
• Bridge the learning loss, provide socio-emotional support to children.
• Partner with 2 state governments to co-design and implement a scalable model of school leadership development programs.

Advice to New Entrepreneurs: 

” Being a changemaker can be daunting,” Manvi believes. Her advice to the new entrepreneurs is:

• A clear vision of the impact they want to create.
• Ability to research and produce evidence-based results.
• Be flexible in experimenting with different models to define the best workable definition.
• Focus on the purpose of the organization.
• Working with the right team that believes in you.

Manvi the Shaktipreneur:

Manvi believes that a good incubation program provides customized support to all aspects of entrepreneurship.

“Entrepreneurship is a lonely journey, and an incubation program provides you with a family to support and guide in the right direction to make your organization a success,” Manvi asserts.

At STEP, Manvi met entrepreneurs from different sectors and was able to understand the importance of female bonding. 

“STEP was a unique opportunity for me to understand the journey of an entrepreneur from a gender lens,” Manvi conveys.

Shakti was Arora’s first incubation program and being new to the entrepreneurship world, it gave her guidance and support.

“I was able to explore my hidden strengths and use them effectively to make strategic decisions for my organization.”Arora reminisces.

Manvi fondly remembers the Tuesday session by Ameen Haque on the power of storytelling.

”The session was an eye-opener for me on how I could use storytelling to build a brand for my organization, and I took a similar session for school leaders,” she recalls.

Mentoring was the best part of STEP incubation for Manvi. She is still in contact with her mentor, Suchetha, and discusses her issues to find answers.

“My mentor played the role of a personal and professional therapist, helped me accept my vulnerabilities, and gave me the courage to discuss them within my community. She changed my outlook on entrepreneurship.” she fondly remembers.

Manvi is very close to her community members, and she can unhesitantly ask for help from them and vice-versa. 

”I have collaborated with a couple of entrepreneurs in the community to enhance the impact we create, and we are leveraging each other’s strengths to ensure that we can give the best to the schools we serve,” she adds.

Alokit used the grant disbursement money for the implementation of Project Shakti – A project to train 123 school leaders leading girls’ residential schools in Andhra Pradesh to support them in making their schools’ gender inclusive.

“The grant disbursement process was open and transparent to all, and it pushed us to develop critical pitching skills to survive in these virtual times,” she says.

Manvi feels that entrepreneurship is a difficult journey for women and STEP helped her understand the skills required to survive it.

Manvi, the person:

Manvi is a simple person and looks up to her mother for inspiration. Her favourite food is Rajma chawal, and her preferred holiday destination is Leh Ladakh. “The power of the subconscious mind” is the best-loved book of this powerhouse who lives by the motto ”Live and let live.”