Outlook Business | WoW 2017: Gloria Benny on improving childcare - video Dailymotion

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Guardian of Dreams co-founder Gloria Benny makes a case for why childcare must not be a privilege for few but the norm for all   Read the stories of all the 17 women achievers profiled this year https://www.outlookbusiness.com/speci...  You can also find the edition on the Outlook Group app or buy a digital copy from Magzter  Download Outlook Group: http://app.outlookindia.com/  Digital copy: http://subscription.outlookindia.com/...  Music: Vodovoz Music Productions  #GloriaBenny #Childcare #WOW2017 #Business #OutlookBusiness #OutlookMagazine #OutlookGroup

Transcript

00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:03 Well, ladies and gentlemen, before I

00:05 invite our next speaker for this evening,

00:08 there's something that I want you to take a look at.

00:10 [VIDEO PLAYBACK]

00:16 [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:21 - What is a dream?

00:22 A dream could be something from our imagination, our desire,

00:26 and ambition.

00:29 Our children's dreams are the nation's future.

00:32 Their dreams today have the potential

00:35 to be tomorrow's reality.

00:36 Many of us have the care, love, protection,

00:42 and support that we needed.

00:44 But for 40% of India's children who

00:46 are in need of care and protection,

00:49 that's not the case.

00:50 As a society, if we want to get where we want to get,

00:57 a place where supporting children's dreams

01:00 is the norm and not a privilege, we

01:03 need to decide and make that happen instead

01:05 of just giving us sympathy.

01:07 [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:16 - May I now welcome Miss Gloria Benne.

01:19 Miss Gloria is the co-founder of one

01:22 of India's fastest growing youth volunteer network

01:25 called Make a Difference and Guardian of Dreams,

01:29 a platform that empowers youth to become change leaders.

01:32 Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome her

01:34 with a huge round of applause.

01:35 Miss Benne, thank you.

01:37 [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:43 - Good evening, everyone.

01:44 It's an honor to be here today.

01:51 It's like some of you just said, it's

01:53 humbling to hear all the stories of women who

01:57 have gone above and beyond, in a lot of ways

02:03 gone beyond the limits that society sets for us

02:06 and becomes a shining light for the rest of the next generation

02:10 to come in.

02:12 My name is Gloria Benne, and I run a nonprofit organization

02:16 called Guardians of Dreams.

02:20 And it's interesting because today I'm

02:22 going to talk about a topic which

02:24 I think us women are great at.

02:28 It's the mother of all causes, child care.

02:32 Yes, pun intended.

02:33 So to start with, back in 2015, all of the UN member states

02:43 got together and basically came up

02:46 with a curated list of 17 sustainable development goals.

02:51 And world over, all countries came together and said,

02:54 these are the 17 goals that we want

02:57 to strive to achieve by 2030.

03:01 So if you run through this list, you'll

03:04 notice that there are themes of ending poverty,

03:08 of fighting injustice and inequality,

03:12 of tackling climate change by 2030.

03:16 But if you take a closer look at this list,

03:20 there's something that's quite discomforting.

03:23 And surprisingly, something that seems

03:25 to be very, very important and an important facet

03:29 of human development that seems to be missing.

03:32 The words child, childhood, and child care.

03:40 And on the other side, when I think about it,

03:47 it's not surprising.

03:48 It's actually symptomatic of a larger issue.

03:52 The issue is that clearly, child care or child development

03:58 as a topic or as a sector itself seem to be ignored,

04:04 or we're not acknowledging that sector in its whole.

04:08 And if you look at-- and there are other examples of this

04:17 as well-- if you look at what is the best--

04:24 or rather, let's look at this, which is that,

04:27 why is child care so important?

04:30 And by not acknowledging child care as a holistic sector,

04:35 how is that manifesting in the kind of interventions

04:38 that we're designing our society around?

04:41 What's happening, actually, is that a lot

04:43 of the organized efforts in the space that

04:46 is dealing with children, because child care as a sector

04:49 is not fully defined, is confining itself

04:53 to just narrow fragments of the overall topic.

04:57 For example, there's a lot of emphasis on education,

04:59 and rightly so.

05:01 There is some emphasis on nutrition,

05:02 and there's a lot of effort happening in that area.

05:06 There is also effort on prevention of abuse, and so on.

05:10 But those are just three different fragments

05:13 of a larger topic or a larger banner called child care.

05:17 Now, let's think about this.

05:19 If all of us in our room, when we were young

05:21 and when we were children, if these

05:23 were the only three inputs that we received,

05:26 which is great quality education, where

05:28 we had sufficient nutrition, and safety and protection

05:31 from abuse, would we be where we are,

05:35 and would we achieve things in life

05:38 without the other aspects that we had and have received,

05:42 which is love, care, attention, exposure to opportunities,

05:46 possibly even having that one adult or parent around

05:49 who egged us on till we became, I would say,

05:54 positive adults in life?

05:57 Not really, right?

05:59 Exactly.

05:59 That's exactly the problem with child care just not being

06:04 looked at holistically, but just the focus

06:06 being on different fragments.

06:09 But then, if all of us could be where we are today,

06:13 something about the kind of child care we received

06:16 has worked.

06:18 And if we look deeper, we'll notice

06:19 how somehow families falling into the middle class

06:24 and above brackets have been consistently and effectively

06:28 been producing positive adults, irrespective of where

06:33 the child's born or which country the child's born into,

06:36 be it India or Pakistan, Vietnam or US.

06:40 If you happen to be born into a family that

06:42 is middle class or above, the likelihood of you achieving

06:46 financial stability, the likelihood

06:47 that you have received sufficient nutrition,

06:50 of not getting into trouble with law and order, all of this

06:53 seems to be phenomenally high.

06:54 So then the question is that, what exactly

07:01 are these middle class and above families getting right?

07:05 What is their micro societal approach

07:08 to child care that seems to be working so well,

07:11 while larger state missionaries seem to be missing this?

07:15 And we look a little deeper, we notice

07:17 how families are not focused on just the childhood inputs

07:23 or how to effectively and efficiently deliver it,

07:27 but they're basically willing to throw everything and invest

07:31 everything in the child that would achieve the end outcome.

07:36 There lays a sharp focus on just purely getting a child

07:41 to become a positive adult. That is what is clearly

07:46 making the difference between how child care is looked

07:49 at within a family unit and what is looked

07:52 at outside of a family unit.

07:57 So let's say families are great at child care,

08:02 then the question to ask is, then why not leave child care

08:05 to just families to take care of?

08:08 Why not the state and the larger society

08:11 focus on things that families don't take care of,

08:14 which is let's say, livelihood or tackling climate change?

08:18 Why not just leave child care to allowing families

08:21 to take care of children?

08:23 Oh well, we don't really have an easy way out

08:25 on this one either.

08:27 The ground reality asks us to rethink this approach.

08:32 A report that's published by SOS Village

08:35 shows that there are actually in India alone

08:38 two crore children who are at risk,

08:43 who are classified orphans, who are outside the family unit,

08:49 or rather two crore children for whom the family unit has failed.

08:55 Now the question is, are we as a society

08:57 going to allow these two crore children to just be

09:01 and wait for circumstances to play with their lives?

09:05 Or are we as a society going to take responsibility

09:07 for these two crore children who happen to not be born

09:11 into great families, but still can have the potential

09:15 to grow into people like you and I?

09:16 And what that means is, as a larger society,

09:24 as a state, we must figure out how

09:27 to deliver effective child care at scale

09:31 outside of family units.

09:33 How do we do that?

09:36 First of all, I think one of the main areas

09:39 is this whole black hole of child care.

09:43 What are the different childhood inputs

09:45 that will produce effective adults?

09:48 Identifying those inputs and isolating them,

09:52 understanding their relation to producing adults,

09:57 and from that knowledge, designing interventions

10:02 that will ensure that they are effectively delivered,

10:05 and then setting up or building capacity

10:08 to ensure that these solutions that are designed

10:11 can be delivered at scale.

10:13 At the age of 19, we founded an organization,

10:22 or rather our first organization,

10:24 gave me an opportunity to work with,

10:28 or got exposed to 10,000 children

10:32 living across children's homes

10:34 in 23 different cities in the country.

10:37 These were children that came in

10:39 from various challenging traumatic scenarios.

10:44 There were children that went missing,

10:46 there were children that were abandoned by families,

10:48 there were children that were rescued by trafficking.

10:50 Basically, there was one common banner

10:52 that remained the same across all of these children,

10:55 which is they did not belong to any effective family.

10:59 And it was this exposure that a few of us got

11:04 at a very young age that kind of shook our,

11:07 and in a lot of ways, burst our bubble,

11:10 'cause we happened to be born into a great family,

11:11 so we didn't think there were children that didn't have.

11:14 So what startled us about the way these,

11:19 the orphanages or children's homes worked

11:21 was that the quality of childcare

11:23 that was delivered in these homes was so poor

11:28 that it was a safe assumption to make

11:30 that these two-crore children had little chance

11:33 of getting out of their poverty cycle

11:36 and becoming positive adults.

11:38 However, if we need to get this right,

11:43 what, after a decade of working in this space,

11:45 what we were convinced of was that

11:49 these very own children's homes or orphanages

11:52 was actually the bedrock of childcare within a society.

11:56 For a child that is not born into an effective family,

11:59 the state says, "Hey, come over.

12:01 "We have orphanages, we have children's homes

12:04 "where we will provide as effective

12:06 "as the childhood inputs that you would get in a family

12:08 "so that you could also become a positive adult."

12:12 That's why children's homes are so, so crucial

12:15 for us to work with.

12:18 Me and my team in Guardians of Dreams

12:20 is actually working to fix this.

12:22 What we're doing is we look to transform

12:26 the quality and effectiveness

12:27 with which these children's homes across the country

12:30 are able to deliver childcare.

12:32 And we're doing that by, again,

12:35 we're trying to keep a laser-sharp focus

12:38 on figuring out what are the various childhood inputs,

12:43 filling those knowledge gaps,

12:46 designing interventions based on that knowledge,

12:50 and then building implementation capacity.

12:53 What we're doing in Guardians of Dreams

12:55 is taking a 360-degree approach

12:58 to working with children's homes,

13:00 enabling them in various aspects, right,

13:02 from improving the environment of the homes

13:06 to improving the kind of nutrition

13:07 that the children are getting

13:08 to looking at improving the quality of education

13:11 to also looking at how are the children

13:13 able to access their rights

13:15 to eventually looking at who are the caregivers

13:18 that are working with the children in these homes.

13:20 And with my team in Guardians of Dreams,

13:24 what we're looking to do is to build and craft

13:28 a better future for our children,

13:29 to build a society where we can guarantee

13:33 that every child gets their required care

13:38 and support to grow into positive, productive,

13:45 stable adults who will then become the future of our nation.

13:50 Thank you.

13:53 (audience applauding)

13:56 (upbeat music)

13:59 (upbeat music)

14:01 (upbeat music)

14:04 (upbeat music)

14:06 (upbeat music)

Outlook Business | WoW 2017: Gloria Benny on improving childcare

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