After we wrote about Galit Zamler’s innovative Entrepreneurship for Kids (EFK) curriculum for Israeli schoolchildren, people in other countries saw the story online and began contacting her.
Within months of the article’s November 2018 publication, Zamler signed contracts to provide EFK to schools in India, Vietnam and Botswana.
Zamler’s K-12 curriculum has been implemented in 70 Israeli elementary schools since 2010. Even before we wrote about it, EFK had been adopted by the Hebrew Academy in Miami Beach and franchised to a company in Hong Kong.
The curriculum instills business skills along with independent and positive thinking, perseverance and teamwork.
Readers in India liked the idea of that winning combination and contacted Zamler immediately.
Winny Patro, CEO of Innovation Valley, a government agency in the southeast Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, traveled to Israel in December 2018 to meet Zamler. He approved the introduction of EFK in the country’s public schools through a licensing-and-distribution agreement with Indian company Carengrow.
Meghana Kambham from India with Galit Zamler, founder of Entrepreneurship for Kids. Photo: courtesy
In May, Carengrow founder Dr. Meghana Kambham came to Israel with a delegation including her mother, Peesapati Suseela Rani, principal of an award-winning Indian school, for a training session with Zamler.
Kambham, a physician, explains that Carengrow is focused mainly on bringing affordable, accessible healthcare to all sectors of Indian society but has recognized that “apart from heath, lack of employability skillsets is the biggest, most threatening aspect to our country’s youth.”
She looked for solutions from Israel, which she considers “the best nation for anything quality, cutting edge and creative.”
“Today, there are about 230 million children aged 4 to 14 in India,” Kambham tells ISRAEL21c. “They are going to be our future workforce in the next 60 years. We must prepare them for that, and we are going to do that by teaching them the important skills of the entrepreneur with the Israeli Entrepreneurship for Kids Program and its methodology and technique. We want to help the future generation in our country to solve their problems with the ideas and mindset from Israel.”
The Israeli mindset was also what made EFT attractive to Bui Do Nguyen and Nguyen Phuong Nam, Vietnamese educational entrepreneurs who acquired a license of the program and came to Israel in April with colleague Chau Buu Hoa to arrange distributing the program in enrichment centers and schools in Vietnam.
“They want their kids to learn entrepreneurship and when they searched the Internet, they saw this program from Israel. That aspect is very important to them because Israel is a model for them,” Zamler explains.
And in Botswana, female entrepreneur Wangu Sarinah Thipe is launching the program under the name Kidpreneur through a licensing agreement with Zamler, who is training participating teachers online from her home in Ramat Gan.
In a brochure, Thipe describes the program as a “self-paced curriculum with real-time hands-on tutorials for children to develop entrepreneurial ideas and attributes that will become building blocks towards an entrepreneurial journey in each child’s life. These skills can be acquired at an early age, and the sooner we expose kids to entrepreneurship education, the better we will be able to raise a generation of people who believe in themselves and in their abilities and who aspire to make their mark in the world.
https://www.israel21c.org/our-story-leads-to-deals-in-india-vietnam-botswana/
