Taleemabad - Digital Literacy Program

At the age of 18 I had dropped out of college and opened my first school in the slums of Islamabad. In a few years of running the slum school, I fell in love with the profession of teaching, seeing its ability to transform the lives of those who had started life in a disadvantaged position. I discovered that I was not the only one with a lackluster interest in education, and found an alarming number of learners with the same attitude.

Since then I have traveled across the world, and then across small towns and villages in Pakistan, hoping to uncover what makes educational models work and what breaks them down.

In 2015, I founded Orenda, a company made up of young designers, educators, teachers and technology enthusiasts, who are working towards a day when high quality, engaging education is available to every child in the world.

Children in public schools display a lack of interest in learning mainly due to the absence of localisation and contextualisation in the curriculum. This has led to i) 66.8% of children dropping out after primary school, and ii) stunted learning levels - Nearly 43% do not possess basic literacy and numeracy skills. 

Taleemabad is a digital platform that provides an online and offline solution to the multiple challenges faced in improving the status of education. It combines the Standard Learning Outcomes from the national curriculum of Pakistan with animation and storytelling to provide an engaging animated series and thousands of assessments that help users cement their learning,  ultimately repairing stunted learning levels by creating customised learning pathways.

Education can help earn higher wages, create a sense of accomplishment, improve critical thinking and make individuals more tolerant, and primary education is the foundation on which a better society can be built.

Basic literacy and numeracy are skills that all children should possess by the age of 10 if they are to build a strong foundation for future educational endeavours. Failure to do so is termed as learning poverty by the World Bank and by this definition, more than 40% of children in Pakistan are learning poor.

Furthermore, 44% of children aged 5 - 16 are still out of school, including 8.96 million girls who represent 53% of all OOSC. Out of those that are in school and finish their primary education, 66.8% drop out and don’t transition into middle school. There are many reasons for why children never enroll, drop out or show signs of stunted learning levels.

1. Children display a lack of interest in attending school largely due to i) the unengaging manner in which teaching is done, and ii) a teacher to student ratio of 1:38, which means that teachers are unable to pay attention to each child’s unique learning needs.

2. Lack of contextualisation - most of the curriculum seems foreign to children.

3. Children are forced to learn in English a language which is foreign to them. Most children only speak their native language.

The Taleemabad series brings the National Curriculum of Pakistan to life through a combination of engaging animations and storytelling. Our team of Education Specialists break down the National Curriculum into Standard Learning Outcomes (SLOs) and convert these SLOs into scripts, which follow a story in the lives of our signature Taleemabad characters who mirror the average Pakistani child to make them more relatable. These scripts are then converted into animated episodes by Visual Learning Designers, Post-production Artists and Voice-over Artists.

The series has found a natural home in the award winning Taleemabad Learning App which also contains hundreds of quizzes disguised as games and 20,000 assessments which i) allow users to practice what they’ve learnt through the Taleemabad series, and ii) responses to the assessments are recorded and mapped against micro SLOs. This keeps the platform cognizant of real learning levels, allowing it to pinpoint where learning deficiencies lie. Once these deficiencies are identified, the platform can take users back to them, even if it means jumping between grades, and remedy them. Slowly, by targeting weaknesses and deficiencies, we can repair stunted learning levels and bring users to the appropriate learning level or even help them go beyond them.

Orenda’s formative years were spent in small towns, villages and slums all around Pakistan, where we lived in these areas for weeks, worked in the fields with farmers and taught their children. This experience clearly defined the most at-risk people - people living in underserved areas who either do not have access to schools or have become disillusioned with the benefits of education due to the subpar quality of education available in public schools.

We maintain a strong on-ground presence with a field team that lives in these areas to monitor and report changing situations so that they can be factored in while developing the app. They also conduct training sessions for teachers, parents and students to make them aware of how they can extract the most learning out of the Taleemabad platform.

Our target users fall in the 5 - 16 age range -- the K12 spectrum -- who use the app as a supplemental tool. However, in some cases the app has also been used as a primary source of education such as children who are confined in hospitals due to prolonged treatment, and most recently by children who are out of school due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Infrastructure remains an issue in the areas mentioned above so building schools and bringing the current schools up to standard will take time. In the interim, entire generations are at risk of remaining learning poor. However, in these same areas, smartphones and mobile internet are spreading at a blistering pace which presents the opportunity for the Taleemabad App to provide a quality education, endorsed by the Ministry of Education, to the people living in these areas. Women, religious and cultural minorities, and economically stressed people in particular have the unique chance to avail this learning opportunity.

I had grown up watching shows like Mr Rogers Neighbourhood and Sesame Street - shows that developed a sense of curiosity and community in me, as they did for countless other children, evident from the Recontact Study conducted in 1994 where the lives of children who grew up  watching Sesame Street were monitored. In conclusion, these children performed better academically, especially in core subjects, but also became healthy contributors to society and more driven individuals.

At 18, when I dropped out of college and opened my first school in the slums, I taught using the same ideology that had shaped me growing up. By using engaging content to teach, I was able to not only bring street children (children who had concerns about basic survival) to school but also make them stay, learn and develop the same hunger to learn that had been instilled in me as a child.

Taleemabad started out with me and a couple of people (who are still working on Taleemabad) crammed in a tiny storage room at my parent’s house, trying to make learning material more engaging by introducing cartoon characters. This evolved into a puppet show which ultimately became the Taleemabad Animated Learning series.

As a child I did not wake up in the morning aching to go to school. While my siblings received distinctions and plaudits all across the country, I struggled. Once, I got a B- on a history test and my father beat me and made me sleep on the floor as punishment. The next day, as my mother buttoned up my shirt for school, I timidly asked her the question that had bothered me for so long -- why study?

In college, I had reached the pinnacle of my struggle with this question, eventually dropping out and returning home. In the months that followed, my struggle with this question continued. In the same months, I opened a day-care centre for street children where I started teaching - something that I had never thought I would do. In the first few days, one of my earliest students tugged at my hand and asked me the question that I had asked my mother and my teachers all my life - Why study?

In the field, I found an answer - every child’s need for education is different. I strive to educate children so that they can answer the question - why study.

In 2013, I was chosen as a WISE Learners’ Voice Fellow to receive mentorship from some of the top faculty from Harvard, Stanford and Yale. I was selected for the year-long Executive Education Program run by Dr Thomas Cassidy of the Harvard Graduate School of Education where I was trained in the latest pedagogical approaches, especially for classrooms in emergency situations. During the program my focus was on Finnish and Scandinavian models, studying them in great detail and synthesizing their possible replication in emerging countries.

In 2014, during an internship at Ashoka, I traveled to and researched 50 of the best schools in the United States, cataloging what made children that went to these schools excel in academics and socio-emotional development.

In 2015, I was chosen to represent Pakistan at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony.

In 2017, I was chosen as an Acumen Fellow. In the same year I also completed the year-long Leading Change distance learning course from Cambridge University on systems change, activism and organisational leadership.

In 2018 I was presented with the Young Leaders’ Award by Queen Elizabeth II for my work in education.

By combining all of these experiences and my experience of teaching and living with the people I want to reach, I want to usher in the next era of education.

We started out with a school model, where we would play the Taleemabad series on a projector and provide workbooks as practice material. However, teachers weren’t cooperative as it was added work for them and were often found fabricating results. Also, I realised that we can open hundreds of schools and it won’t be enough to solve the problem. We needed a more scalable solution that was also more reliable.

During my time in the field, I had seen crippling poverty but I also noticed an oddity - almost every person had a smartphone. That is when I came up with the idea for the Taleemabad App.

However, I needed a team. I assembled a group of individuals who were passionate about education and whose vision was aligned with mine. None of us had any experience but we slowly learned and made progress. I made the first prototype on Proto.io (bit.ly/TaleemabadFirstIteration) and hired college students as interns to develop the app, one of whom is now the Product Manager for the Taleemabad App.

Gradually, we have gotten to where we are now, teaching 400,000 children through the award winning Taleemabad App.

When I had returned home after dropping out from college, I had no direction in life. My family had stopped speaking to me, especially my father who had sold a considerable amount of our family’s assets to send me to college in the first place. The months that followed were one of the most difficult periods of my life.

One day I was walking in the streets near my house and wandered into Bheka Syedan - the slum where I would open Akhuwat-e-Awam (Urdu for ‘brotherhood’), my first school. Seeing the condition in which children over there were living in reminded me of the abuse I went through as a child in a similar setting. Almost as a knee jerk reaction, I raised money from the community to rent and renovate 2 rooms in the slum to act as a day care centre where I would feed, clothe and eventually teach children from the street. Here, I taught K-5 grades for 2 years, hired permanent staff, raised a community of 200 volunteers to help run the school and got the school registered with the government to ensure students would receive certification.

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Taleemabad has two foundational elements on which the digital platform is built:

1. It takes a carefully curated team of Learning Specialists, Graphics and Visual Learning Designers, Developers and Data Analysts to make the Taleemabad series into an engaging and effective learning tool. We treat teaching as a science, and content delivery through digital means an even rigorous application of that science. Each episode of ours goes through a meticulous engagement test called the Stallings Classroom Observation method. Children in focus groups are made to do pre and post-trial tests to measure learning gains. From 2015-2016 our company made and discarded over 4000 minutes of animation - simply because they did not perform. We are also the only platform that has a comprehensive Urdu (national language of Pakistan) curriculum.
   
   Making characters relatable and creating a knowledge inertia helps us develop a close bond with our users. This bond allows us to engage children for longer and ensure deep-rooted learning. However, it also has a much larger role in shaping the future of the next generation by instilling acceptability and tolerance for people with different appearances and from all kinds of backgrounds. 

1. The second foundational element is the assessments and quizzes, created by assessment specialists, and disguised as fun games to eliminate the stress associated with taking a test. The assessments are also an integral part of making the platform adaptive and helping repair stunted learning levels.

As teachers turned tech entrepreneurs we have conducted extensive research, in theory and through our own findings as well. We treat teaching as a science, and content delivery through the Taleemabad platform a digital application of that science. This is to ensure that learning gains are efficient, and have led to Taleemabad students gaining functional literacy and numeracy 31% quicker as compared to their peers who do not use Taleemabad. Teaching through Taleemabad has also led to a 70% decrease in dropouts in our partner schools and an average session length (the time a user opens the app and closes it) of 9 minutes, longer than that of YouTube in Pakistan. 

The story of one of the girls in our Rajanpur project epitomises our theory of change. Zeenat Asghar Bibi was initially not allowed to continue her education beyond Primary Grades because the family preferred her brother due to financial constraints. However, with her brother’s failure to pass his exams, she was allowed to take part in Taleemabad’s project, after much convincing by our team, the teachers of the school and the education administration of the area. Zeenat, who developed a particular liking for Maths, was soon applying her newly acquired knowledge to help out her father with handling the household finances by quantifying their income and expenses, and creating a budget which they had to adhere to in order to start saving money. As word got out, she began helping her neighbours with their household budgeting as well, which ultimately resulted in her gaining the respect of her family and of the community.

This instance shows how we want to bring about change, and not just in the lives of the students of Taleemabad but of the community around them as well. Just as Zeenat Bibi was able to bring about change in a historically rigid community with something as simple as Grade 6 Maths, girls equipped with proper education will lead the campaign for social restructuring, where girls play an important role in the social, political and economical uplifting of their communities, their country, and the world.

Current people being served = 400,000

Number of people it will serve in one year = 2 million

Number of people it will serve in 5 years time = 5 to 7 million

Within the next year we will complete our Primary Grades curriculum. With K-3 already made, we are on track to finish Grade 4 and Grade 5 curriculum by November/December 2020. Around the same time we will pass the 1 million users mark, making 7 years of quality education (K-6) available to these users on their fingertips for a yearly subscription fee of just $12. Our goal is to focus our reach outside of Tier 1 cities and spread into Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. This requires an on-ground presence and perfecting our B2B model over the next year as we enter into key partnerships that enable us to engage with low-cost private schools spread across the country in Tier 2 and Tier 3  cities.

In the next 5 years, we aim to complete the entire K-12 curriculum and translate it into multiple regional languages such as Sindhi and Pashto. Translation of content into Pashto will also open the doorway into Afghanistan which shares the Pashto language with the KPK province of Pakistan and is also in need of a remote education intervention. By developing the necessary partnerships with Telcos, we aim to have Taleemabad pre-installed in low cost smartphones across the Subcontinent to make access easier and more affordable. Ultimately, we want to create enough case studies that enable us to run an advocacy campaign and bring about systemic change as well.

We started out as 3 people crammed into a tiny room in one of the founder’s parent’s house, trying to come up with more engaging ways to teach children at the school we had opened in the slums. Since then we have evolved into a multi-award winning social enterprise, employing 50+ passionate people determined to bring about lasting change into a flawed education system. The growth of the company and its impact, and the acceleration of that growth is dependent on the amount of money we are able to inject into it, which has not always been available in abundance and acted as a barrier.

The financial barrier has a trickle down effect, as with limited financial resources we are not able to hire and keep hold of talented individuals who cannot be paid as highly as they deserve to be paid.

Market barriers such as ubiquity of smartphones and internet, and effective payment methods are still a constraint. Smartphone and internet use is still concentrated in urban areas due to the high cost associated with them and infrastructure for brick and mortar banks in rural areas does not yet exist nor will it in the near future.

Protection of our IP has also remained a legal barrier. We have come across individuals who are selling the Taleemabad content on DVDs without our consent and for extremely high prices.

We started out as a not-for-profit organisation but soon realised that although there are extremely generous donors out there, we can not remain dependent on philanthropy for long. Since then we have shifted to a social enterprise structure and introduced paid features such as assessments, the parent portal and adaptivity. The video lessons remain freely accessible and the cost to access the paid features is kept to a minimum amount so that it remains affordable for everyone and enough to make us self-sustainable.

Employee growth remains one of our top priorities and is done through constant reskilling and upskilling opportunities such as fellowship engagements and  the freedom to get involved in multi departmental work. We are also raising separate funding to secure the best talent in the industry to work on the Taleemabad project.

To overcome availability we are engaged with one of the top mobile operators in the country to provide more competitive data packages and to onboard Taleemabad as part of their mobile e-services such e-agriculture, e-health and e-money. We are also in contact with low-cost smartphone manufacturers to have Taleemabad pre-installed in their phones as a value-added feature. Low-cost smartphones will make smartphones grow beyond Tier 1 cities and give us the opportunity to take education in these areas.

Protecting the IP still remains a challenge to which we have not found a surefire solution but we are always hunting down such flags until we find a permanent solution.

We partner with multiple organisations that share our vision. Most of these organisations are fund partners that have enabled us to carry out the work that we do. They include Peery Foundation, Dalio Foundation, Malala Fund, Mulago Foundation, Telenor and Newton International Academy. Collectively, we have received more than half a million dollars from these organisations as grant money. Recently, we have also partnered with Facebook through which we have received $14,000 worth of Facebook ad credits.

To ensure that our content is effective in delivering the lesson in an engaging and ‘sticky’ manner, we partner with multiple schools where each episode goes through a meticulous engagement test called the Stallings Classroom Observation method.

Recently, we have been endorsed by and partnered with 1) the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training (MoFEPT) to broadcast the Taleemabad series on a free to air, purpose built education channel called TeleSchool, 2) the Ministry of Education Punjab, providing them with the Taleemabad series to air on their own educational channel called TaleemGhar. We are also part of Ilm Association, a collection of all EdTech companies in Pakistan, and are also supported by a content aggregator called Ilm Exchange, run by the LEAPS research faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP).

Our on-ground presence has allowed us to not only create relevant content that delivers real learning gains but has also helped us carve out a digital marketing strategy that has brought down our user acquisition cost to just $0.05.

Recently, the Taleemabad series has been picked up by state-owned and privately-owned tv channels for broadcast, with a collective reach of 54 million people. Our current user base is concentrated in Tier 1 cities where smartphone ownership and mobile internet usage is high, and while we build a strong base in the cities, we are using television and radio broadcast to establish Taleemabad as a brand in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, rural areas and villages. As smartphone penetration increases (51% in 2020) and 3G/4G coverage becomes wider (76 million users) in these areas as well, we will see conversions to the app increase in these areas, where the majority of the population lies.

Once people are brought to the app through the multiple channels mentioned above, they are met with a freemium model which allows them unrestricted access to all the features of the app for a period of 7 days. After the trial period users are locked out of premium features and presented with 3 different yearly subscription offers which range from $7 to $12.

Our intentions are Non-Profit but our approach is sustainable, which will help us secure the future of the venture without dependency on external help. We provide video lessons for free, not just through the app but also through multiple other channels such as television (with a reach of 54 million viewers) and radio. However, other features of the app such as the assessments, game-based quizzes, and the parent portal that allows you to create a user profile and keep track of your learning, are all paid features. We offer all of these features in the app for a Yearly Subscription fee of just $12, an amount that is affordable but is also enough to take us to sustainability at scale. By June 2021, we have estimated revenue to reach $92,000+.

We have also secured continued monetary support from 2 donors as a contingency, for the next ten years. This contingency is valued at nearly $250,000 USD per year.

Moving forward we are also exploring VC funding opportunities.

Peery Foundation had initially become fund partners in 2019, with an initial grant of $50,000. In 2020, they have not only renewed their commitment but also doubled it, with a $100,000 recurring grant.

Furthermore, another member of the Big Bang Philanthropy network, Mulago Foundation, has come on board as a fund partner with an initial $100,000 grant, and an option to enter the Rainer Arnhold Fellowship the following year, for a yearly $250,000 grant.

The Malala Fund is also a fund partner and has awarded a $210,00 grant specifically for Girls Education.

Facebook has provided us with $14,000 worth of Facebook ad credits to market the Taleemabad app so that we can reach more users, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when schools are indefinitely closed.

We are also on the verge of closing two more grants soon, each grant valuing at $89,000.

We are also in the final stages of two more grants, each valued at $250,000.

To continue working at the same pace, we would need to raise an additional $500,000 as grant money, in the next year. However, to scale up our impact and start implementing our ambitious plans to become a global force in education and provide quality education to all underserved communities, we would need to raise at least $1 million in the coming 12 months. This would preferably be in the form of a grant, however we are also looking into VC funding opportunities that aligns with the ethos of our work.

Estimated expenses for 2020 are $250,000. Content Production takes up 42% of the total budget, Tech and Engineering takes 32%, Marketing takes 21% and Accounting and Administration takes up 5%.

Primarily, the money. We bring one user to the platform at a cost of $0.05. With $300,000, we could have a strong back to support our effort to onboard millions of users to the platform. Content production is an expensive process, in terms of both time and money. The money would also help us build a bigger team and develop content beyond the 6th grade and finish the K-12 spectrum in a couple of years.

Beyond the money, we are aware of the vast network that would open up to us through winning the Elevate Prize which would help us in certain areas that have proven problematic thus far, such as finding partners that share our vision and can help us with the technology development as we move towards better adaptability.

Grantmakers, Mobile Operators and VCs.