STEP North-East Founder, Worrin Muivah shares about his initiative on Education

I wanted our upcoming generation to have a better shot at life than we did. I wanted them to be able to take better and more informed decisions than we did; Bridging the educational and opportunity gap between the urban and rural areas of Manipur and the North-East.

UT Desk

April 18, 2021 - 12:10pm

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My life has been a complete trial and error method. Growing up, there was nobody to guide me. So I had to carve my own path. The only advice my parents and my near and dear ones could give me was, “Study hard and become somebody in life”. But there was nobody to really show me the way. But by God’s grace and through my parents’ prayers, one thing led to the other and I could be where I am today.

After having lived outside my home state for the last 10+ years and having travelled the world and exposed to so many different cultures and societies, I realised that our society was 20-30 years behind in terms of everything. This realisation and my lived experience of having grown up in such a society left a profound mark in me. I wanted our upcoming generation to have a better shot at life than we did. I wanted them to be able to take better and more informed decisions than we did. All these realisations and desires made me resign from my job and come back home and start my own NGO called STEP (Social Transformation and Educational Platform).

Thus, STEP was born in November 2020 with the focus to bridge the educational and opportunity gap between the urban and the rural areas of Manipur and the North East.

STEP focuses on three verticals viz:

1. Communication Skills Training for teachers (Majority of the teachers in the rural areas are untrained. STEP trains these teachers with the basic communication skills to be able to teach their students better. At STEP, we believe that your degrees don’t make you a good teacher but the ability to connect with your students and inspire them makes you one)

2. Student Exposure Programmes (Students in the villages have no exposure whatsoever. Their whole life revolves around their village and their village school. This leads to a lack in motivation, aspiration, and ambition for no fault of theirs. STEP addresses this issue through its exposure programmes wherein STEP brings people from different walks of life virtually and physically to these students for them to interact and learn from each other)

3. Career Counselling (STEP conducts career counselling workshops to sensitise the upcoming generation of students to be able to make wise academic and career decisions before it’s too late)

Aside from these three verticals, STEP’s aim is to also create a platform for our educated youth to give back to the community. STEP can only do so much alone but with a community of like-minded individuals, the impact can be much greater!

Founder Profile:

Worrin Muivah has over five years of experience in the development and corporate sector. He is a Young India Fellow, a liberal arts post graduate Fellowship delivered in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania, King’s College London, Sciences Po Paris, University of California Berkeley and Yale University. Worrin completed his Master’s in Development Studies, specialising in Human Rights, Peace and Conflict Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University, in The Hague, Netherlands, on a fully funded scholarship from the Government of India. While at the Hague, he was also selected as one of the 30 participants from around the world for the Peacemakers 2016 Workshop/Conference on “Migration and Securitization of Europe : Views from the Balkan Corridor”, organized by Koc University, Istanbul in collaboration with the University of Kent. Prior to setting up STEP, Worrin was the Head of Marketing and Outreach and Senior Programme Manager at The Naropa Fellowship. Worrin has also worked with Leaders’ Quest as a Program Coordinator and have been part of three successful Quests in Romania, Malaysia and China. Previously, Worrin worked with N-Sight Consulting, a Think Tank specializing in the sphere of social policy and electoral behavior, where he successfully headed their North East India project enabling their client to emerge as the single largest party in the state election. Worrin has also worked with Amnesty International India in their “Undertrials Project” where he and his team successfully investigated the causes of excessive undertrial detention in the Indian prison system and campaigned for systemic change in the criminal justice system. They successfully published their findings as a report titled, “Justice Under Trial: A Study of Pre-trial Detention in India”.