Day 10: Start of My Consulting Project with Camfed

Woke up excited about starting my consulting project with CamFed. Olivia & I (the team calls us Glorivia since we're working together on all of our projects! & are mostly stuck at the hip for the same reason). Our appointment with the Camfed staff was at 9:00 am, so had a quick breakfast and headed to their office which just not too far from Holi Flats.

Camfed is an international organisation which have been operating in Ghana through local NGOs since 1999. However, they started offices of their own 3 years ago (primarily in Northern Ghana which are predominantly muslim commmunities) and has done some remarkeable work in helping girl children complete education and in providing them livelihood. Their focus is on women & children as they believe educating girls is pivotal to improving the education levels of entire families & will increase the per capita income by 24 %. The stability of their model came from the fact that they involved the community by including key decision makers like the village Chief in the decisionmaking committee & ensured that everyone had bought into the idea of educating their girls.

Our role was to help them train 6 girls who were to start 3 IT centers in the north. The training involved a combination of motivationg/inpirational, best practices to follow while running such a center & also impart basic technical skills to increase their capability. The first thing we did was to get Camfed, Accra list ing Google places - it was nice to watch their excitement when they heard what Google Places did. The fact that a person as technologically stunted as I am could be a resource for them shows how much they're in need of such guidance & support.

The meeting made my day & I was happy to have chosen Camfed as my consulting project. Definitely wanted to add value to this organization while I was here and hopefully even remotely.

University Outreach:

After lunch at office - all the fastfood is making me fat!! :( So much for the football & daily work outs in Hyderabad. Oh well, nothing much I can do about it I guess. I'm 5 shades darker & possibly 2kgs more than a week ago.

Anyway, 5 of us headed to the Central University where we were hosting a University Outreach event. It was a platform for the students to interact with Googlers, learn about internships, roles in Google & about Google's product. I used some usual MAD tricks to get the crowd to loosen up - the most common MAD ice breaker - of making your animal sound to group yourself & Building the tallest balloon pyramid was the plan. Well, it didn't work as well as I would've liked (Indian students are more enthu. Hrmfff!!) but I'd like to believe it's the heat that got to them! :D

Each of us spoke a bit about our past experience, how internships are important, what Google looks for while hiring. We were bombarded with questions during the Q&A sessions. There was 1 chap who came up & asked 4 questions one after the other and pretty intelligent ones to - like what's Google's yoy profit (we knew QoQ revenue - so that was close enough :) ).

My first night where I had dinner at the flat - yummy mangoes they have here! :) Reminds me of the mangoes in Kerala - the vegetation is so similar!