One in five 14 to 18 year olds in India cannot name a single kind of work they're interested in pursuing (ASER, 2023). Years of schooling, and still no sense of what matters to them. That's not a learning gap. It's an agency gap.
We define agency simply: having the skill and the will to take action towards what matters to us. It sounds basic, almost obvious. But most young people in this country are never given the chance to build it. School teaches them to follow instructions well. It rarely asks them what they want, or gives them room to find out, or lets them fail at something that was actually theirs to begin with. So they move through years of education arriving at adulthood able to comply, but not necessarily able to choose.
This matters more right now than it ever has. The world these young people are entering doesn't reward compliance the way it used to. It rewards people who can identify a problem worth solving, act on it without being told to, and keep going when the first attempt doesn't work. That's not a skill you can lecture someone into. It has to be built the same way any capability is built: through repeated experience. Set a goal. Act on it. Hit a wall. Choose to keep going anyway. Do that enough times, and something shifts. A young person stops waiting to be told what matters and starts deciding for themselves.
That's the gap our model is built to close. We work in ten-week cycles, and the short timeline is deliberate. Most youth programs are built to be around for a long time, ours isn't, not in the way a single learner experiences it. If a program takes months to show results, the lesson a learner absorbs isn't "I can do this." It's "I need someone else to make this happen." That's dependence dressed up as support. Ten weeks is short enough that a learner has to move, act, get it wrong, and try again, with something real to show by the end. When they look back at what they built, the story they tell is about what they did, not about us.
Two things carry a learner through those ten weeks. A Champion who believes in them, no strings attached, someone who checks in consistently without instructing or correcting, whose only message is that someone believes in you no matter what you're building. And the ability to mobilise resources themselves. Our early pilots gave learners direct funding, assuming money was the gap. It wasn't. It just made them dependent on us for the very thing we wanted to teach them to do on their own. So we replaced it with something harder to give but more durable: the skill of mapping the people and networks already around them, and asking for what they need.
We track this across three things: how clearly a learner can articulate what they want, how confidently they act on it, and how well they mobilise resources beyond what we give them. Clarity feeds confidence, confidence drives action, and action leads a learner to start seeking out people and opportunities on their own. Agency isn't a single moment of transformation. It's a pattern that builds over time, and it's one we can actually see and measure as it forms.
Building agency in young people isn't a nice-to-have alongside education. That's the point of it. We don't just need a generation that can pass exams. We need a nation of people who can think for themselves, who can identify what matters to them and act on it, who see themselves as active participants in their own lives and learning rather than passengers moving through someone else's plan. That's not a side effect of a good program. It has to be the goal we design for, directly and on purpose. That's what we're building.
