Dipak Basu describes India’s Ganges Delta as “a very beautiful place full of mangroves and forests and tigers and king cobras and whatnot—and a whole lot of very poor people.” When Basu asked those people how he could help, their clear priority was jobs. They asked the Cisco Systems Senior Director to teach them the job he knew best: how to use computers.

Basu launched Anudip Foundation in 2006. Within three years, the job training and placement nonprofit was doubling its reach every year by focusing on developing IT and digital skills. What’s more, it achieved a 75 percent job placement rate—nearly four times the rate of peer organisations in India.

With 41 percent of citizens under age 18, India’s population is the youngest in the world. “Some people call it a demographic dividend,” says Bridgespan Partner Rohit Menezes. “Other people call it a demographic time bomb, where the Indian economy has to generate millions of new jobs a year just to keep people employed. And that’s really just not happening.”

By 2016, Anudip was placing 12,000 young people from poor, tribal, or otherwise marginalised communities in jobs every year—and wanting to do far more. Longtime Anudip funder, Omidyar Network, connected Anudip with Bridgespan’s brand new Mumbai office. Their joint ambition: figure out how to expand Anudip’s annual reach to 100,000 youth served, without a proportional increase in expenses.

From the outset, Anudip understood that to increase reach by a factor of 10—but increase expenses by only a factor of three—it would need to incorporate some online education. The question was how to make this happen.

An exhaustive process of gathering feedback ensued. The Bridgespan team traveled to various parts of India’s West Bengal state to conduct focus groups, surveys, and interviews with former, current, and potential students, as well as trainers, employers, experts, and Anudip funders and advisors.

The team learned that Anudip’s clients were very happy with the nonprofit’s services. On a scale of 1 to 10, students rated their overall experience with Anudip an average of 8.1, placing high value on the quality of instruction they received, as well as the job placement supports. Importantly, while they were open to tech-led learning, they also really valued in-person learning and support.

In the final phase of the project, Bridgespan worked with Anudip to translate feedback and analysis into a 12-step transformation roadmap to implement and scale a blended-learning approach.

Read the full article about Anudip Foundation at The Bridgespan Group.