Youth Agency and Learning Lab

Currently in India, 73% of students leave education before the post-secondary level. Moreover 93% of the workforce is employed in the informal sector with few opportunities for personal advancement and career growth. There have been growing calls for educational systems to enable students to become ‘job creators’ rather than ‘job seekers’, by helping students to become more agentic in their personal and career decisions. This impetus can be achieved through a focus on supporting students to become more entrepreneurial as they graduate from high school. However, little to no research exists on the impact of entrepreneurship education on youth agency particularly in the South Asian context.

Since its inception, the Udhyam Learning Foundation has run entrepreneurship education programs for youth across government schools in Delhi that emphasizes experiential learning through engagement in curricula based on mindset transformations and real-world entrepreneurial projects. With a framework built around transformative agency, the curriculum incorporates and responds to the realities of students’ lived experiences, current economic and social contexts, and calls to focus on student agency, wellbeing, and entrepreneurial mindsets. The lab seeks to investigate the impact of programs such as these on youth agency to gather evidence to inform curriculum development, pedagogy, and larger national and state policy around formal education.