Akshai Abraham

Founder

Founder of Society for Development Activities (Project KHEL)

Akshai Abraham is the founder of Society for Development Activities (Project KHEL) (2012)[1], an Indian non-profit working on education, sports and women & children from Lucknow.

Akshai Abraham is an Indian development professional and the founder-director of Project KHEL, a programme of the Society for Development Activities based in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. Project KHEL uses sport and play to teach life skills to children and adolescents from disadvantaged backgrounds, including children living in slums, children who pick waste, children in shelter homes and the children of domestic and migrant workers. He founded it in 2012.

Early life and education

Abraham attended a boarding school where sport was a central part of his education, an experience he has described as formative. He holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Forest Management in Bhopal.

Career

Early in his career Abraham spent a year as an intern with AIESEC in Austria, an experience that shaped his decision to return to India to work in the development sector. He has been involved in studies commissioned by international agencies including the World Bank, USAID and UNICEF, and has worked on education development programmes with Aide et Action.

He founded Project KHEL in 2012 after about seven years in the development sector, with the aim of creating learning experiences built on the principles of safe spaces and gender sensitivity for the holistic development of adolescents. The organisation runs curriculum-based programmes in Uttar Pradesh in partnership with low-income schools, community centres, shelters and care homes, using sport as a medium for life skills education and awareness of gender and other issues.

Project KHEL operates under the Society for Development Activities, which was started by a group of non-profit professionals, and is based in Gomti Nagar, Lucknow.[2][3][4]

Society for Development Activities (Project KHEL)

Project KHEL, run by the Society for Development Activities, uses play and sport to deliver life-skills education to children and young people in Lucknow. Working from Gomti Nagar, it runs core programmes alongside workshops and trainings, and publishes its partnership, social media and child protection policies and annual reports publicly.

Society for Development Activities (Project KHEL) reports the following, on its own site: