The google guide program encouraged me to write my first story on the Local Guides Connect. I am glad this is the far-most best achievement of my life that as a local guide as I had the opportunity to bring more local guides like me onboard as a local guide without extra resources.
My job is to educate the government school Children of Tamil Nadu state,India. The job requires reaching out to the school and teach children the importance of hygiene e.g, hand-washing. As most of the students are children’s of daily wage earners they lack this basic privilege and knowledge.
Finding a school in an urban setting is easy but still a struggle. We begun the project with 5 schools hence it was not a problem but as we grew bigger and went into the deeper roots of the state (rural area) finding the school was very difficult. One wrong guidance from a local and you waste your time.
Google Maps was a major help. To me it was limited to reviewing, editing and posting pictures from my travel. However we took this fantastic tool to a new level of mapping.There are about 32,000+ schools in the state and only 1500 were accessible on the maps with 60% accuracy. It was a big challenge to locate and reach the school because we would have multiple staffs visiting of numerous reasons for e.g. follow ups,training, deliveries of materials. Sometimes i have to open the maps to check my route from work to home, forget about keeping the directions in mind for a school and explaining them to your colleague. Hence we started adding schools on the maps step by step. But we had another problem as we were only to able to add a school after reaching the location which took time and we had to deliver faster.
Thanks to the Local Guide Program, we called up the teachers, principals, head masters any one who had access to Google Maps and requested them to mark their schools on maps. So this way it was not only easy for us to visit. It helped officials from state governments, non profits etc who were related to the school chain and they reached without any hassle. But we were achieved another target as those persons who marked their schools unknowingly turned into a local guide.
Hence today we have more than +200 teachers who are active local guides and +21,000 schools listed on the maps. Our volunteers or staff could reach directly at the doorstep as most of the delivery apps or app based taxi aggregates uses Google Maps.
