The Livelihood School is an academic institution promoted by BASIX group, a modern livelihood promotion institution. Livelihood involvements are conscious efforts by an organization to encourage livelihood opportunities for the masses, particularly the rural poor and women.

Objective
The primary goal of this school is to build a knowledge base on livelihoods and disseminate the same to livelihood practitioners, who will then promote a large number of livelihoods. The Livelihood School aimed to help participants acquire a broad perspective on different models of livelihood promotion; understand the process of livelihood support adopted by different intervention agencies; and appreciate that livelihoods can be promoted or supported in many different ways.However, as they learnt all too soon, there are two significant bottlenecks witnessed in the field of livelihood promotion: inadequate availability of a knowledge base on how to support and promote large number of livelihoods, and inadequate availability of trained human resources who can participate in this work effectively.The school realized that an intervening agency was needed to chart the path of promoting livelihoods and provide a framework for analyzing livelihood intervention choices in understanding the process with the choices offered. Given ii’s experience in handling projects on sustainable livelihood programs, they approached iridium Interactive (ii) to provide a framework for analyzing various design elements of a livelihood intervention and also to lay out the choices available to an intervention agency on design parameters.

Solution proposed

The team at ii worked closely with the Livelihood School to develop a comprehensive training solution, utilizing full audio narration, animations, high-quality graphics, advanced simulations and tests. ii enabled an effective and consistent learning and knowledge transfer throughout the learning sessions at the Livelihood School. As the visual design team at ii which worked on this project pointed out, “The Livelihood project was an exceptional e-Learning module right from initiation, and design to development and implementation. Overall, it provided us great learning experiences, both personal and professional.” The first module of the training course gives a description of livelihoods; the second module addresses how livelihoods can be promoted, and the third module explains the framework for analyzing livelihood intervention choices.

Results

ii charted out a solution which facilitated an analytical and systematic design of a livelihood strategy by clarifying an ambiguous training framework. The course is designed to be learner centric – the learner will be able to learn at his/her own pace, enabling 100% learning. The training module designed by ii has led to a noticeable increase in the training volume, generating more revenue and reaching more people. Based on e-learning, it can be used as standalone training, or as a supplement to the classroom training. Given that the training module was designed to be a self-learning one, the faculty was left free to focus on R&D, leading to qualitative improvement in curriculum. And finally, consistency of training was maintained across the geographies, cutting down on incurred costs. These tremendous results led Shankar Dutta from the BASIX group to exclaim, “We accomplished something that we never expected!”

About ii
iridium Interactive Limited (ii) specializes in providing online business solutions. With a presence across three continents, it has been at the forefront in integrating strategy, design and technology to build unique and robust user-centric e-business solutions. At ii, a holistic approach is adopted towards complex business problems to arrive at a complete solution. ii’s talented team has worked on a variety of disciplines for a multitude of clients drawn from various industries, and has a number of award-winning works to its credit. ii offers it services in the areas of interactive marketing, web marketing, e-learning, enterprise consulting and web accessibility initiatives.

ITC is one of India’s foremost private sector companies with a market capitalization of over US $ 16 billion and a turnover of US $ 3 billion. Rated among the World’s Best Big Companies by Forbes magazine, ITC ranks third on all major profit parameters among India’s private sector corporations. ITC has a diversified presence in Cigarettes, Hotels, Paperboards & Specialty Papers, Packaging, Agri-Business, Packaged Foods, & Confectionery, Branded Apparel, Greeting Cards and other FMCG products. While ITC is an outstanding market leader in its traditional businesses of Cigarettes, Hotels, Paperboards, Packaging and Agri-Exports, it is rapidly gaining market share even in its nascent businesses of Packaged Foods & Confectionery, Branded Apparel and Greeting Cards.

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ITC’s International Business Division, one of India’s largest exporters of agricultural commodities, has conceived e-Choupal as a more efficient supply chain aimed at delivering value to its customers around the world on a sustainable basis. The e-Choupal model has been specifically designed to tackle the challenges posed by the unique features of Indian agriculture, characterised by fragmented farms, weak infrastructure and the involvement of numerous intermediaries, among others. Farmers can access latest local and global information on weather, scientific farming practices as well as market prices at the village itself through this web portal – in Hindi and local languages like Marathi, Kannada and Telugu. A dream that was visualized at such a large scale, to be realized, required that the personnel involved be trained for effectiveness and efficiency.

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A set of key findings emerged from the evaluation of training needs. With a workforce of over 1000, hub operations spread across many states and numerous hubs operating in each state, it called for a massive human resources initiative to ensure that these personnel receive the best of training on par with international standards. And what better way to ensure effectiveness of training than through computer based training modules. ITC float a tender to receive technical and commercial bid for the same. More than 10 companies were bided for the same. Finally based on experience and past work ability iridium Interactive was allocated the Computer Based Tutorial development work.

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ii Value Proposition for ITC

� Computer Based Tutorials

� Any time-Any where learning

� Portable & Less paper work

� Accurate and efficient content construction

� Cost savings

� Significant Return on Investment (ROI)

� Increased learner�s retention and bring attention

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For additional information regarding iridium Interactive – visit www.iridiuminteractive.com .