Saajha

Saajha aims to improve the learning of children going to government schools by providing a single platform for their parents to access information and to ensure effective usage of learning tools that are publicly available. The key problem we are solving is the lack of support for parents to facilitate the use of learning tools and content. The parents we work with generally do not have the necessary information and mechanisms to enable the use of appropriate learning tools for their children.  We provide them with information through various communication channels and support them on usage through a helpline operated by parents from similar communities.  If this platform is scaled up, it will help in connecting parents with other parents to get information and to solve challenges related to their children's learning. In essence, a global community of parents supporting each other.

We are focused on improving the foundational literacy and numeracy of children from age 6 to 11. A nationally recognized assessment, ASER, in 2018 found that ~50 percent of 5th standard students, in 1 million government schools across India, cannot read the text of 2nd standard. Children need immediate help in acquiring foundational skills in literacy and numeracy. 600+ million children and adolescents across the globe are not reaching minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics. While the content for improving the reading levels of children is widely available, families and parents do not have the required information or competencies to use them. This problem got aggravated during school closures post Covid-19 since families did not have access to appropriate support systems on using learning content such as digital apps or books at home.  We focus on solving this problem and have seen that when parents are provided support, they can impact not just the learning but the lives of their children. 

Our solution enables the creation of a support network for parents. Parents can reach out to us on our platform, through a helpline or other communication channels, to initiate conversations regarding challenges that they face.  Our call operators listen to them empathetically and provide relevant solutions. Once the solution is provided, a follow-up is done again after 6 to 8 weeks to understand if they are facing any more issues in using the suggested solution. Our call operators are parents from similar communities. Parents who can help other parents use our technology to operate our helpline, through the cloud-based telephony-enabled app. Parents download the app to become call operators and provide solutions to solve the grievances of other parents. We also create a database of the most common queries and solutions that have been recommended to families to improve the learning of children. 

Our solution serves families from India’s low-income communities, where children study in government schools. In Delhi—where our solution is primarily being used-—over 2 million children study in government schools, a majority of whom belong to such low-income households with parents who require support in giving quality education to their children. A nationally recognized assessment, ASER, in its 2020 survey showed that 84% of the children who have parents with low levels of education and 71% of children with parents who have a middle level of education attend government schools. Lack of support for our parents on using materials and activities for children, and the ways in which children and families engage is a barrier to enable continued learning at home. We provide a single-point support system on challenges related to their children’s learning. The support can be accessed through a helpline. The helpline is empowering and empathetic in its approach as it is community-driven. Parents from the community are employed to respond to calls. The operations are managed from their respective homes, making them decentralized and scalable. Solution provided are documented making it a useful resource for parents. Since the helpline is run by parents, it is operated in native languages and provides timely, effective, and locally accessible solutions for the parent in need.

The solution we have developed addresses the need for strategies and tools for parental support to impact the learning of children.  We focus on enabling parents to effectively support children's learning by providing them relevant solutions to learning content and its usage.  Our solution covers children and their parents from low-income and marginalized communities. While providing a solution to parents, the technology developed by us also enables us to create a network of parents who could support other parents.

Our solution is in the growth stage. We have undertaken several pilots in Delhi with approximately 7,000+ parents over the last two years.  An independent assessment in 2019 by a third-party agency has also been undertaken for one of our programs to assess its impact on learning. The assessment found that when support was provided through a parental intervention, 40.6% of learners using a reading app improved their Hindi reading fluency levels compared to 19.0% in the control group. Last year, we also undertook assessments ourselves to understand the impact and effectiveness of our product. We asked parents if they found the information provided by us useful. 72% of parents said it was useful. We have also received feedback from them on developing our product further.

At a time when a plethora of avenues is available that cater to resolving issues related to children’s learning, it becomes difficult for a parent to get verified resources or to keep a track of them. Our solution provides parents with a one-stop platform to get the required support to engage with their children. To enable this solution, we are building/training members from within the community to support other parents. We are building a database of questions so that the knowledge could be shared easily at scale. We use simple cloud-based telephony technology and WhatsApp Bot to implement the program. We believe that if we could build a robust one-stop platform and an army of community members that could support each other, then we will be able to scale our impact and enable efficient learning-at-home techniques. 

Currently serve: 5000

Next year: 10000

Next five years:  1 Million families 

Currently, our solution is serving 5000+ families in Delhi, by providing support through a single-point helpline. This number was achieved in a year by us and we aim to double the number of families which is 10000 by next year and impact the child’s learning level towards growth.  With improved processes and simple solutions, we aim to target 1 million families in the next five years.

Saajha is building a one-stop solution to support parents to impact the learning of children. The solution helps in supporting the parents in the challenges that they face, through helpline support.  The indicators we use to track our progress are:

Providing information on Access: Monitored through the data collected during and post the conversation with the parents. The focus is on providing the right solution to parents in 24 hours. We also look at the number of parents we are supporting. 

Usage of the service that is offered: This is undertaken for a smaller sample of families. The purpose is to find out information around the usage of the shared resource.

Impact on the children: This is again undertaken for a smaller sample of families. Currently, we focus on assessing improvement in the reading ability of children. We assess the reading ability by using standardized tools.

Full-Time Staff Members - 5

Part-Time Staff Members - 0

Full-Time Consultants - 27

Part-Time Consultants - 3

Our team is well-positioned to deliver this solution.  The team at Saajha is diverse and comprises people from the communities we serve. The parents we work with are an active part of the work we do.  Through our intervention, we work with a network of parents and then identify “parent partners” who become champions of education in the community, thus supporting other parents. All the products that we have developed have come about as a result of feedback from our parent partners.  We have, in the past, created, piloted, and developed solutions for communities we work with. The team consists of an experienced group of people in technology, monitoring and evaluation, content, operations, and program delivery that provides expert viewpoints from a wide array of fields. The team leading the solution has been associated with the organization for the past five years and has created innovations around parental engagement previously unheard of in the Indian education sector ( such as SMC app, training in a bag, Training portal for school boards). In the last five years, we have mobilized support towards the cause of parental support and have generated interest within various state governments in India to enable greater parental and community participation.

Our team is diverse in nature and has people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, qualifications, religions, genders, and sexual identities. Women constitute a majority of our team members, although we lack adequate representation of women in our leadership team. We have committed ourselves to have more women leaders at Saajha.  We have policies that allow people to take 24 weeks of paternity/maternity leave ( applicable to all the staff irrespective of their gender). We organize regular sessions with the team to build leadership, plan and implement ideas, and boost self-confidence in the team members. To ensure diversity, we hire from different communities and set specific goals for ourselves to hire from underrepresented communities at Saajha. To make the selection process accessible, we make it simple and easy for candidates to reach out to us. Once people are at the organizations, we create spaces for listening to them and create changes in our policies to allow for everyone to feel safe and grow within the organization. We are not perfect but the culture of listening has enabled us to create an organization that is resilient and open to people from all backgrounds.

We are applying to Solve since Saajha solves children’s learning-related problems by engaging parents. Saajha is in a growth stage and being part of the Solve community will allow us to contact and collaborate with other organizations who are working in the same field. 

Solve would help us in three ways 

1)Partnerships: We can find key partnerships to enhance our growth, create new opportunities, get feedback and advice from experts. It could enable us to build expertise and create processes for the roll-out of the technology at scale. 

2) Funding: We need funds to make our technology more advanced and easy to use for our beneficiaries. Being a part of the community will allow us to connect with potential funders  

3)Best practices: Solve and its community are known for best practices in the tech domain. We are keen to learn from their experiences and address any challenges we would face. 

Monitoring:  We need support to enrich our data and track our solution progress. 

Technology:  We are looking for support in order to further develop and enhance our technology

Financial: Financial to scale our solution and support more parents. We would like to connect with more funders to raise funds for our program. 

Product/services Distribution: Partnerships with other organizations can support us to expand our program reach and to onboard more parents.

1. Organizations that could help us to provide learning content to involve and engage more parents for effective learning of their child while staying at home.  That would also make it easier for parents to teach their children at home and to acknowledge the impact of learning on their children.   

1. Organizations that could help us in further developing the technology to create a peer-to-peer support network: Developing technology to create a platform where champion parents can help other parents by providing solutions to queries related to child’s learning in real-time. 

1. Investors:  Who believe in our mission. They could support us in raising or providing funds to scale our solution to bring the impact and support more parents in their child’s learning.

1. Research: We would like to get support to understand the tools, mechanisms, and methods of this field. Research organizations can help us in creating metrics and processes. These metrics can support us to understand how impactful our solution is. We also want to partner with research organizations to understand the impact of our intervention on children.