“Intense love doesn’t measure – it only gives.” -Mother Teresa

Bethania Kids was one of the earliest contacts we made in India (thanks to Laura, our networking guru). A non-profit whose ministry is rooted in the Christian faith, Bethania is in fact composed of two organizations: Bethania Kids-USA, based in Michigan, and Bethania Kids-India, based in Bangalore (a city that is looking more and more like a NGO/SE hub of southern India).

The breadth of Bethania’s ministry reaches out to a diverse population in India, including children, women, and the disabled. Hosting programs at the grassroots level, it currently serves about 1,000 children without regard to caste or religious background.

Dr. Gnanakan’s description of Bethania’s work with children from India’s tribal areas resonated with my past experience in anthropology (one of my former majors). Bethania aims to promote empowerment and education to improve livelihoods within rural areas, but at the same time, it also seeks to preserve the culture of these communities, particularly in within the tribal areas. As our team continues to design GSE, we recognize that operating in an urban environment will be challenging enough; transitioning to understanding the needs of a rural area uncovers an additional layer of the India’s social and economic divides.

Many rural children that Bethania works with understand the importance of education and want to continue on their studies beyond high school, but challenges lie in funding them. The cost of post-secondary education in India continues to rise while government scholarships remain negligible. The funding that supports Bethania’s centers and orphanages only covers the cost of educating students through Plus 1 and Plus 2 (two additional years of schooling beyond 10th Standard, the equivalent of completing the 12th grade in the US).

An excerpt from Dr. Gnanakan’s project proposal reads as follows: “On average, there will be 50 children on the whole that will go for +2 education each year from this support, among which at least 10 to 15 can be sent for higher education.” Many of these students have been involved with Bethania since they were very young; after successfully supporting these children through secondary school, Bethania is looking to craft a financially sustainable way of enabling these bright students to continue their education.

In the coming years, the challenges faced by organizations such as Bethania Kids will only multiply. Over the next thirty years, India will continue to experience the effects of its “demographic dividend,” ultimately becoming “the only young nation in an aging world,” as discussed by Nandan Nilekani in his 2009 TED Talk. His thoughts capture the situation faced by these non-profit organizations and India as a whole:

“…A demographic dividend is only as good as the investment in your human capital. Only if the people have education, they have good health, they have infrastructure, they have roads to go to work, they have lights to study at night — only in those cases can you really get the benefit of a demographic dividend. In other words, if you don’t really invest in the human capital, the same demographic dividend can be a demographic disaster. Therefore India is at a critical point where either it can leverage its demographic dividend or it can lead to a demographic disaster.”