Haruto Okabe, MPP 2025, was so inspired by the organization he interned with through the WAPPP Cultural Bridge Fellowship that at the summer’s end he was already envisioning possibilities for similar work in his native Japan.
Haruto spent his summer working on impact assessment for the Agastya International Foundation based in Bengaluru, India. Agastya, described by Haruto as an “innovative education nonprofit,” focuses on educational interventions for students in STEM subjects.
The sessions run by Agastya “focus on fostering creativity,” Haruto wrote in his internship blog. “Through experiments, students get surprised, observe, and feel the joy of STEM+ subjects.”
He described visiting one of Agastya’s classrooms filled with experimental tools for the students to explore and learn about, and said how inspiring it was to him even as an adult.
“Agastya’s teaching approach, instead of being knowledge-driven, is experiment-driven,” he wrote after the site visit. “If I had experienced this classroom when I was 12, I might not have chosen International Relations as my major; I might have become a scientist instead.”
As excited as he was to see the classroom in action, Haruto was in Bengaluru to help assess Agastya’s program impact. The program had only recently started tracking learning outcomes on a short-term basis, in addition to their annual data collection on long-term outcomes. The new short-term data, in combination with long-term data, provided opportunities to gain insight into individual sessions offered.
While the data analysis and impact team faced some challenges, including inconsistent or missing data, they were able to analyze short- and long-term data to build a “predictive model of student learning,” and draw some significant findings.
“I was deeply impressed by the team’s unwavering commitment to impact creation. I came to realize that impact assessment is more than just an impact assessment. It’s a communication tool so that we can further the impact in the future.”
One especially meaningful finding was that gender had little impact on students’ learning – both boys and girls were seeing progress in their learning outcomes from Agastya’s intervention.
At a discussion with other fellows at the Kennedy School in September, Haruto explained that, due to "subconscious bias that science is for boys… it’s always been a question whether Agastya’s intervention is actually gender neutral."
Seeing the assessment that learning outcomes were the same regardless of gender was, therefore, an exciting development for the organization.
It also fit with what Haruto experienced firsthand, when interviewing girl students at Agastya’s schools. He heard several times from girls that prior to Agastya’s sessions, they felt hesitant to speak up in the classroom, and in Agastya’s class “everyone was empowered” to contribute to class discussions.
In addition to feeling like he’d contributed to meaningful impact findings, Haruto developed a deeper appreciation of the concept of impact assessment itself.
“I was deeply impressed by the team’s unwavering commitment to impact creation,” he wrote. Through his work with them, “I came to realize that impact assessment is more than just an impact assessment. It’s a communication tool for donors, for government, for citizens, so that we can further the impact in the future.”
In his final blog post reflecting on his internship, Haruto said he hopes to help bring the kinds of innovations he’d seen in Bengaluru to other parts of the world. Having experienced primary and secondary education in Japan, it was meaningful for him to see this level of education in another nation and a different cultural context.
“I firmly believe that Agastya's pioneering initiatives offer valuable insights for nonprofits in Japan,” he wrote, “and I am continuing to bridge the gap between global and Japanese efforts to address social issues.”