A Bengaluru girl presented her project to train accredited social health activists (ASHA ) workers in cardiovascular pulmonary resuscitation (CPR), before the faculty of UC Berkeley, San Francisco recently. The presentation was made under the 1M1B (1 million for 1 billion) programme and won the second prize.
The project by Veruschka Pandey, a 14 year old class 9th student of The International School Bangalore, stood out for its feasibility, execution, and relevance.
"My project Suryanayak aims to train ASHA workers CPR, because currently there are 1.5 lakh ASHA workers in India and one per 1,000 population. I thought teaching this substantial population predominant in rural India would help me advocate my cause and raise awareness like a domino effect, because these ASHA workers are well-knit within their local community" said Veruschka.
She carried out her project in Kolar. "I reviewed their first aid material and went for a five-hour course on CPR myself, to review what they would teach. After this partnership, I collaborated with them for my first training session in Kolar."
The SCET hosted students from Gen Z problem solvers from India as these students pitched their social impact projects to Cal students, faculty and alumni.
While developing her project Surya Nayak, Veruschka was able to raise crowd funding that she plans to use for piloting further training and equipments for Kolar district and facilitate this learning to many more districts and amongst masses in the next phase
