Bindu Sunny, MA '04
In Search of the Big Picture
As the old adage goes, it's sometimes hard to see the forest for the trees. In India, as elsewhere, that often means social ills are tackled with the best of intentions, but without ever getting to the root of the problem.
A case in point: while studying sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, Bindu Sunny, MA '04, analyzed educational services for the children of sex workers in the red light district of Delhi, India.
No future
"Child care workers assumed that these children had no future, so often the educational strategies employed failed to provide hope and optimism about a way out of that lifestyle," says Sunny. "There are so many NGOs in India that identify a problem and jump in to try to do good, but too often they fail to uncover the root causes of the problem. They feed the hungry, but invest very little in inquiring why people are hungry in the first place."Sunny's search for a holistic development perspective led her to Heller in 2002.
Connecting the dots
Already a professional when she arrived at Heller, Sunny was nevertheless hungry to learn. A microcredit course with Professor Jeffrey Ashe got her thinking about ways to empower people to become economically self-sufficient. She started to connect the dots."If women are able to start their own businesses, they may not have to send their children to work to help support the family. I saw that microcredit could have an impact not only on the woman receiving the loan, but also the entire family."
Sunny found an internship project working for the International Labour Organization (ILO) in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The ILO brought together employers, trade unions, and civil society to ensure a child-free workplace and at the same time lobby for competitive wages for adult workers. Sunny authored a paper analyzing child rights and the strategy of the ILO to end child labor. Though this was important work, she felt it fell short of attacking the root problem.
Her goal was to work with an international organization that focused on the big picture. She knew that education was significant in lifting people out of poverty, but if the education was not relevant to their day-to-day lives, parents would not likely be inspired to let their children attend school.
"How is geometry or the planet system going to help a poor field worker or an out-of-school adolescent girl in India?" she asked.
Designing relevant programs
Worldwide, more than 121 million children do not attend school, many because extreme poverty forces them to forfeit education for work that contributes to the family's income. While working in Andhra Pradesh, home to more child laborers than almost anywhere else in India, Sunny became aware of World Education's project preparing girl child laborers rescued from the cotton seed industry to enroll and stay in formal school, where they could also avoid exploitation by employers and hazardous working conditions that pose severe risks to their physical and psychological development. World Education's approach of using education as a preventive strategy fit right into Sunny's idea of building capacity at the grass roots to empower the community to address development problems. World Education engages teachers, parents, and community members in making education more relevant to the child."There's a tremendous opportunity cost to sending a child to school, so it's critical to address the relevance of education or you won't get far in the race," says Sunny. Relevant information on agriculture, nutrition, and hygiene has been integrated into the existing curriculum, and teachers are being trained in implementing this in the classroom. Sunny was hired as a research intern on the pilot study that measured the impact of the program on the children's education and overall development.
Internship turns into a job
Last year Sunny transitioned from her internship into a job as a program officer in the Boston office of World Education. She acts as a liaison between the home office and the field office in India, providing financial management and monitoring of projects, writing proposals, and assisting with program development."World Education's approach makes sense to me," says Sunny. "My current job incorporates the disparate interests I was trying to pull together as I marched through my education searching for a way to find the bigger picture."