Neev (Hindi for foundational)

A tech solution that supports community early childhood educators in India by involving parents in child development.

Problem

One of the key goals of the services provided under the Integrated Child Development Services of the Indian Govt. is, “to lay the foundation for proper psychological, physical and social development of the child” for the disadvantaged socio-economic sections of the society. The ICDS has improved the status of infant malnutrition, vaccinations and infant mortality rate, there is not enough stress on equipping parents with early psychosocial stimulation skills, building secure home base for children to thrive and social-emotional learning of children. (ICDS-WCD, 2017), Additionally, it’s current plan of action and services largely miss out on making this a reality. These gaps in turn affect the school readiness of children, leading to school dropouts in later years. This crucial missing piece of social-emotional learning both for parents and children in early childhood years is stopping the children from holistic growth and success in later years of schooling.

The ICDS framework needs to involve parents as partners in cognitive and emotional development of children and build capacity in them, in order to ensure that children are ready to meet the demands of schooling in later years. Healthy brain development in early years cannot be achieved without building parental skills for cognitive and emotional stimulation.

Solution:

Indus Action, through its two years of efforts in bridging the gap in parental capacities, has designed an engagement program that helps disadvantaged families get cognitively and socially ready for school. The program provides resources designed in Hindi, to parents, to help them build simple habits necessary to provide quality cognitive stimulation to children in early childhood.

These 4 key habits include:

1. Observing your child’s actions and behavior,

2. Letting the child take initiative in activities,

3. Asking for reasons and use why and what next questions in conversations,

4. Asking your child about what and why of emotions.

However the program is heavily dependent on overburdened early childhood educator to drive nudges for behavioral change and inculcating the 4 key habits of parenting and dilutes program quality. Traveling to the community center is also a deterrent to parent engagement as most parents are daily wage earners and have many competing commitments.

We propose designing a mobile application on which we can upload all our content using principles of behavioral change and nudging that helps parents inculcate these habits through, reminders, audios, videos and interactive chat boxes. The mobile application will reduce the burden on the educator and significantly enhance the quality of program by standardizing content delivery. It will remove the time commitment barrier and traveling to a central location for coaching experiences and make the high quality content available to them in their home.

Hence if we are able to develop a mobile application that provides behavioral nudges to parents from socio-economically disadvantaged sections of the society to develop effective cognitive and emotional stimulation skills for their children in early childhood (3 to 5 years of age) children can be more prepared for the schooling experience and thrive once they enter formal education space.

It is a process to leverage existing technology to solve a critical challenge that faces the landscape of Indian early childhood education. Parents being the pivotal stakeholders in early childhood development need to be integrated in the services provided to this age group. It is a crucial gap that has not been fixed in the context of India, which makes this proposal a one of it's kind tailor made solution for unlocking learning potential of approximately 136851000 children that fall in this age group. 

We aim to use the mobile application as a mode and solution to all the deterrents to our parent engagement program right now. The technology will not only lessen the burden of the community worker and ease her time commitment but also provide customized behavioral nudges to care-givers to build effective habits in them in the comfort of their own home.

We envision that the application, in a few years can eliminate the need for community facilitator as a coach to parents and help children develop in a wholesome manner.

The goal is to create the mobile based application and transfer all our curated and meticulously designed content on to the application.

We also want to pilot and monitor the program with 1000 families this year to generate a rigorous proof of concept by doing a pre and post assessment both of parental habits and child's cognitive development.

We want to use our existing partnerships in 11 states in India to cater to 1 million families by 2020. We want the program to become a part of the Integrated Child Development Services scheme as a robust solution to the government for solving the issue of parent engagement in early childhood.

We envision that in the next 5 years, Parent engagement will be a part of the ICDS and Neev mobile application would be a tool to build it across it's expansive network of 40, 000 community centers and community workers that cater to approximately 23 million families.

We already have an approval from the Delhi Govt. to pilot our solution at a scale of 500 families. Through our existing partnerships in 11 Indian states we will implement our solution as part of the services provided by govt. run early childhood care centers and last mile workers. We do not intend to create parallel systems to deploy this solution.

Indus Action till date has served 30,000 disadvantaged families in getting access to quality education through it's awareness programs and behavioral nudges to secure free education that is guaranteed under the Right to Education act.

Through this program we want to extend the portfolio of our service from providing enrollment support to disadvantaged families to providing educational support to them post school enrollment.

Through embedding the parent engagement program into the gamut of services provided by community workers, we want to pilot the program with 1000 families this year. By 2020 we want to support 1 million families through our enrollment support and parent engagement program to provide high quality early childhood education to children across India.

Specialization in Early Childhood Education, Intervention Design, Cognitive Development, Designing for Learning, Software Coding, Designing mobile based application, Government advocacy, access to larger network of non-profits.

We are positioned for long term sustainability because we work hand in hand with governments through our support and advocacy frameworks. We design excellent technological solutions to some of the pressing problems in the implementation of the Right to Education Act in India. So far our technological support has been adapted 4 state governments in India. We build the capacity of the government to use our solutions and have a clear exit strategy.

Solve can provide us with the crucial guidance needed to create a tech product that actually delivers the behavioral and learning outcomes we are gunning for through it's network of experts. It can help us replicate the solution that we have carefully designed through building a tech product.