Orenda

29.6% of Pakistan’s school-aged children are out-of-school and a recent study suggests that during the pandemic a further 5% have dropped out of school. Many low-cost private schools, which cater to 20 million underserved students in Pakistan, are shutting down due to the financial impact of the pandemic, putting more children at risk of dropping out.

To balance the scales, we designed a ‘starter pack’ for anyone to open a school. This includes learning material, teacher training, technology, marketing and branding. So far, we have successfully opened 4 schools and aim to open 50 more schools in the coming year - elevating micro ‘edupreneurs’ to help us in our fight to eradicate education poverty.

The schools are supplemented by learning apps, and tv and radio broadcast. We want to maintain our momentum on the digital front, and i) keep pushing the Taleemabad Learning App so that it reaches 2.5 million students by next year (1 million downloads currently), ii) reach 10 million+ students through TV and Radio broadcasts (currently at 8 million), and finally iii) expand our content library (it is up to primary grades right now) to reach secondary levels (6th and 7th grade) as well.

At the age of 18, I dropped out of college and opened my first school in a slum. For 2 years I took in children from the streets who had dropped out of school due to a lack of interest and saw firsthand the impact that education can have on their lives when made relevant to their needs. In the process, my life changed dramatically; I fell in love with teaching and quickly learned that education had to evolve.

I found myself travelling across rural Pakistan, eager to see what it would take to replicate our school model at scale. During this time, I stayed in villages for extended periods, teaching in public schools, participating in wheat harvests, attending community meetings in mosques, and going door to door to discover why such a large number of Pakistanis simply decided to pull their children out of school at early ages.

Ultimately, I founded Orenda at the nexus of sound pedagogy, engaging content and technology, with the goal to create an education ecosystem for the underserved. When we succeed in our mission to educate every child in Pakistan, we will have unlocked the potential of 70.9 million school-aged children.

258 million children are out-of-school globally, out of which 22.5 million are just in Pakistan and nearly 2.5 million additional children are expected to drop out due to the pandemic. Out of the 48 million that do attend school, 33% drop out without completing their primary education - 1 child every 2 seconds in a year. This is due to (i) archaic pedagogy, (ii) lack of contextualisation (children are unable to apply what they learn thus fail to see the value in education), and (iii) teaching in a language that is foreign to them (books and learning material are in English).

What we’ve built is an ecosystem for learning, with sound pedagogy at its foundation, and available on multiple mediums. At the centre of this ecosystem are schools opened in partnership with individuals who want to increase accountability in education. Learning at schools is supplemented by broadcast on television and radio, and in apps. This ecosystem engages and empowers all stakeholders - parents, teachers, school owners, and government officials to play a part in imparting quality education to underserved children across the country.

As education entrepreneurs, we know that focusing on one stakeholder to solve a complex problem is not going to cut it. Our solution enables and targets multiple stakeholders; teachers, students, parents and school owners. Doing so means that our product is diverse:

1. Contextual videos, books, gamified tests, and activity-based learning ensure that students remain interested in their education and know-how to apply it practically.

2. Our teachers in schools are given lesson plans that guide them on how to conduct their class, minute by minute. The LMS is also equipped with digital teacher training, allowing teachers to complete them at their own convenience.

3. Our platform streamlines administrative processes of schools: attendances, fees collection, parent communication etc.

4. Through the app, parents get in-time information about their child’s progress and are more involved by helping them revise via the extensive video and assessment library at their fingertips. 

5. Finally, we’re comprehensively multi-platform. Taleemabad can be seen on TV, heard on the radio, experienced in schools and at home. This means that we reach north of 9M+ Pakistanis via our products. For school owners, this serves as a massive marketing boost, helping them scale the success of their schools by landing more admissions.

To achieve deep impact we have (i) convinced the government that edutainment needs to be a mainstay, as lack of interest is often cited as a major reason for dropouts in early years’ education, and (ii) through a pilot, where we reduced the dropout rate by 70% and improved student performance by 31% in 12 public schools, we showed grassroots entities such as public and low-cost schools that contextual, relevant educational material can help struggling students avoid dropouts, and help out of school children continue their studies.

At the core of all our products and services is a deep understanding of Pedagogy. A team of Curriculum and Pedagogy experts breaks down the National Curriculum into SLOs and leads the development of Taleemabad content, assessments, learning materials and M&E framework for schools. This is backed by data collected for all our verticals - ratings of Taleemabad broadcasts, a hotline at the Ministry, reviews of the app and data collected from within the app. All of this data is processed by our data team and sent to the Pedagogy team to make improvements in the design of the program to ensure that it remains pedagogically effective and keeps children engaged as well.