Taleemabad

When the quality of education is poor, children either go to school and drop-out, or never go to school to begin with. 

Pakistan faces a nexus of both of these issues. There are 70 million children in a population of 200 million. 33% of these students go to low-free private schools, while 62% go to public schools. In both, the quality of learning is subpar, with 50% of children not even learning to read by the end of primary grades. As a result, 3.8 million children (6% of the total 5-16 population) drop out from school, while 26% of those aged 5-16 never enroll to begin with. Dropouts and a lack of desire to enroll both combine to create Pakistan’s out of school problem, with 22.5 million children currently out of school, the second highest out of school population in the world.

There is also a dearth of teachers that have been adequately trained to lead a classroom to impart curricular and socio-emotional learning for students. There are a total of 182.7 thousand functional primary schools with 494.3 thousand corresponding teachers in Pakistan. Research notes that, other than a few elite private schools, adequate teacher training and professional development in schools is a scarce resource in Pakistan. While the teacher training programs in government schools are found to be ineffectively designed and implemented, such programmes are completely non-existent in low-fee private schools. 

However, this problem of low educational quality is not an issue restricted to Pakistan alone. The problem exists for all such countries and regions where learning in schools is stunted. Overall, there are roughly 13.65 million primary school children living in Pakistan and countries with a similar socio-economic context, but where there is adequate  access to electricity and internet to incorporate a digital learning solution that can provide quality, equity, and increased access to education.

Taleemabad drastically improves the performance of underserved students in low-fee private schools by utilizing the entire day and multiple delivery systems to ensure that children are engaged and can learn both in school and at home. For classrooms, Taleemabad provides teachers with a tech platform that contains a digital teacher training program and scripted lessons with video content embedded in them so that even beginner-level teachers can begin to use world class learning methods in their classrooms. When students go back home, Taleemabad provides animated learning content to them at home, delivering it via scheduled TV broadcasts, as well as mobile apps that run on low-end phones. The increased 'dosage' of learning time has meant that despite COVID and lockdowns  students in Taleemabad Schools improve their literacy skills by 20% in six months, with 33% of students leveling up their language skills to the next grade level.

Once schools sign up on Taleemabad’s platforms, their teachers are registered and begin to use scripted, step by step teaching guides for every subject and every grade. These guides have Taleemabad’s video content embedded in them, so that a high quality of teaching can be maintained across a wide variety of locations. The use of these guides, as well as the teachers performance is tracked and shared with school administrators as well through the Taleemabad platform. 

Side by side, teachers take a continuous professional development (CPD) course on the Taleemabad Teachers mobile app through which digital training and tests are sent to teachers.

At home, parents get regular updates on their child’s performance, and can use the call centers for queries/support related to their child’s performance. Parents also get access to animated content + quizzes for all lessons through the Taleemabad App, and can either use the app or the scheduled TV broadcasts to reinforce concepts and keep engagement high for their children. 

Hence, a combination of better trained teachers, appropriate and high quality lesson guides/resources, at-home learning support, and automated updates for every stakeholder to keep them informed and involved drives student performance and drastically increases their chances of being retained in schools.

Our solution serves households situated below the $5.5/day poverty line, in places where learning outcomes are stunted in schools. The Global Education Monitoring Report 2021/22 states that nearly a third of all children attending primary and secondary schools in Pakistan are studying in private institutions. Furthermore, Pakistan has the second largest household expenditure on education of any country in the South Asian region (57%), with school fees representing nearly half of the income of parents living on the state poverty line. Our solution, consequently, not only addresses improvement in student learning but also provides households with a high-quality, cost-effective solution to their educational expenditure. 

To further elaborate, most of the schools we support charge a monthly fee of $3-7 ($0.1-0.3 per day) - with parents earning in the bracket of 15,000 - 30,000 per month ($2.8 - 5.6 per day), putting them in the bottom two quintiles of the country by income. 

Our partner schools are located in peri-urban or rural settings, and most parents are either agricultural workers, or semi-skilled laborers working as factory technicians, clerks, drivers, and maids (professions that are amongst the lowest wage earners in Pakistan).. 

Our organization comprises teachers who’ve had experience not only teaching in elite, public and low-fee schools in Pakistan, but also researching and working in classrooms across the world. This has meant that the company has consistently placed learners and teachers at the center of the equation. 

Second, the company has hired some of the best technical talent available in Pakistan to make sure the student+teacher centered-ness is translated into products that are usable and do not break as they scale. 
This combination of tech + education + design leaders has also had experience scaling ed-tech - this is the same team that developed Taleemabad’s app, which now reaches 1.5 million children, and its broadcast experience, which has 8.5 million weekly viewers. 
Our curriculum and work has been endorsed by the Ministry of Education, and the brand’s widespread reach perfectly positions it to solve problems for the low-fee private school segment, and ultimately, public schools in Pakistan.
Our recognition at the international stage (e.g at the competitive WISE education awards in Qatar) helps us lay the ground for creating a model that can readily be transported to other markets where low-fee schooling is the norm (Kenya, Nigeria, India).

A critical barrier that devises a significant part of the problem set for any solution that tries to cater equity and quality is to design for the scalability and sustainability of the solution. Being a part of the Solver community will help us tap into a huge repository of knowledge regarding similar problems and work our way towards a solution for them. More specifically, the issues related to revenue maximization and equitable distribution while staying within stringent budgetary constraints. On a similar note, another key barrier to figure out will be to solve for cost-effective methods of impact evaluation that are rigorous enough to convince payers-at-scale. 

Furthermore, the financial aspect is also a critical barrier that MIT Solve will be able to assist us with since the initial monetary support as well as the access to MIT Solve's credible, impact-oriented investors could assist us in acquiring the capital required to scale our solution and, consequently, provide greater impact. 

There are 4 key elements at the heart of the solution to improve students' learning that make it innovative:

a) Digitally delivered, bite-sized teacher training that equips teachers with the know-how that enables them to impart better learning as opposed to the traditional cascade method of teacher training that has been researched to not work,

b) Scripted lesson plans & assessments + video content in classroom to support teachers in imparting consistently high quality lessons as opposed to the traditional methods of lesson delivery which rely heavily on the teacher's quality to deliver a good lesson,

c) At home learning via broadcasts and mobile apps to enable children to continue their learning at home as opposed to no interactive support for children to continue learning,

d) Admissions support + marketing for schools to deliver better business results for school owners, getting more schools to sign up for the system, and , consequently, increase the access to quality education for children from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds as opposed to traditional methods of documentation and administrative tasks for school leaders that can be extremely tedious and repetitive. 

With a model simple enough to be utilized wherever learning outcomes are stunted in schools, we believe we can catalyse a solution to solving educational inequalities  across the developing world.

Over the next year, we want to further cement the improvements that we can bring about in students' learning outcomes, and to increase our service provision network to 250 schools. In the next five years, we aim to extend our services to 1000 schools, making them sustainable while also maintaining our impact at scale. During this time, we also aim to incorporate additional focus on socio-emotional learning and collaboration within our schools and enable pathways through which our schools become the catalysts for practical implementation of a gender-equitable approach for students, teachers, and administrators. We also aim to refine our parent portal to provide more direct community-centric improvement pathways with a focus on gender and climate equity. 
In many ways, we already have established the foundations for creating our anticipated impact by setting up an evidence-based digital learning environment and school administrators' information management system. The key is to now refine these further and improve upon them as we scale to more schools and add additional features that can positively influence a child's socio-ecological system. 

Taleemabad conducts monitoring and evaluation in three broad ways to measure impact and evaluate outcomes: 

1. Baselines, midlines and end lines: A team of enumerators visits the school as soon before launch, and then every month, as well as at the end of the year. In the first visit, the team collects data on:

   1. Student background (poverty, gender, parental education level, age etc) to determine which factors are already influencing a child’s educational journey. 

   2. Student learning levels: Baselines lay down where a child is at the time of launch in terms of learning levels, and subsequent tests gauge what improvements are being seen in these learning levels. Interventions are then targeted at classrooms which aren’t performing well.

1. Tracking through the Taleemabad LMS: The platform is used by teachers and administrators, and helps us keep track of:

   1. Student attendance and performance (and whether the child is enrolled or dropped out)

   2. Teacher attendance and performance (as measured by lessons delivered and the extent to which the content is being used) 

1. In-person Classroom Observations: These are conducted once a month and measure:

   1. Student engagement and behaviour: Is the student engaged/disengaged in the learning?

   2. Classroom quality: Is the teacher maintaining a classroom that learns more efficiently? Is there a good relationship with students? 

   3. For accelerated/special programs, is the teacher implementing the programs as intended? Are students falling behind or on track?

   4. Does the administration have an open/transparent relationship with parents?

In the simplest terms, our theory of change can be summarized in this way: If we give teachers and school leaders the tools to teach and administer better, schools will impart better learning outcomes, more parents send their children to these school, and more children will get great learning outcomes.

We use apps, SMS technology, and the creation of a digital learning platform to create a digital eco-system that enables students and the stakeholders closely associated to their learning environments to have tools for optimizing the students' learning journeys. To elaborate, we have a Learning Management system for both teachers and students, an ERP system for school administrators, an SMS communication link with parents and administrators, apps for students, parents and teachers, and TV/radio broadcasts of our content. These various technologies are simultaneously utilized by Taleemabad to create a synergetic ideal learning environment for each student. 

Despite being founded in a country that has high gender inequity and a lack of inclusivity, Orenda has strived to create an inclusive, equitable, and diverse team since its inception. The operating principles of our organization are based on the foundations of Orenda being a feminist organization that practices a non-territorial approach to decision-making. The majority of our leadership team is formed by women, and we place the utmost importance to create a team that is inclusive, and one that has equality and fairness and its fundamental principles. 

Taleemabad's business model is based on an extremely simple plan that keeps in mind our customers' ability and willingness to pay at its core. More specifically, we charge an upfront cost of US$ 60 from each school and a subsequent recurring monthly charge of $17/classroom. The low cost ensures that school owners/parents are able to easily provide/afford quality education that they strive to deliver/obtain.

For the impact model, we will refer back to the answer we gave for our solution since the whole design of the solution is impact-driven: 

Taleemabad ensures impact by drastically improving the performance of underserved students in low-fee private schools by utilizing the entire day and multiple delivery systems to ensure that children are engaged and can learn both in school and at home. For classrooms, Taleemabad provides teachers with a tech platform that contains a digital teacher training program and scripted lessons with video content embedded in them so that even beginner-level teachers can begin to use world class learning methods in their classrooms. When students go back home, Taleemabad provides animated learning content to them at home, delivering it via scheduled TV broadcasts, as well as mobile apps that run on low-end phones. The increased 'dosage' of learning time has meant that despite COVID and lockdowns  students in Taleemabad Schools improve their literacy skills by 20% in six months, with 33% of students leveling up their language skills to the next grade level.

Once schools sign up on Taleemabad’s platforms, their teachers are registered and begin to use scripted, step by step teaching guides for every subject and every grade. These guides have Taleemabad’s video content embedded in them, so that a high quality of teaching can be maintained across a wide variety of locations. The use of these guides, as well as the teachers performance is tracked and shared with school administrators as well through the Taleemabad platform. 

Side by side, teachers take a continuous professional development (CPD) course on the Taleemabad Teachers mobile app through which digital training and tests are sent to teachers.

At home, parents get regular updates on their child’s performance, and  get access to animated content + quizzes for all lessons through the Taleemabad App, and can either use the app or the scheduled TV broadcasts to reinforce concepts and keep engagement high for their children. 

Hence, a combination of better trained teachers, appropriate and high quality lesson guides/resources, at-home learning support, and automated updates for every stakeholder to keep them informed and involved drives student performance and drastically increases their chances of being retained in schools. 

In the initial stages, we expect Taleemabad to be independently going to market and providing the solution to 1000+ schools across Pakistan. In the near-term, this commercial pathway enables us to create a sustainable company, while iterating the product so it caters to a diverse group of schools. There’s a wide range of companies providing services to these schools (books/furniture/softwares) - making this a fertile market. 

In the medium term, we aim to become a technology & content provider - still making the software, but allowing other commercial players - book distributors/curriculum makers - to bundle Taleemabad along with the services they sell. Most publishers/book distributors are transitioning into ‘digital’ services but lack the expertise - enabling us to plug in their gap, while unlocking a distribution network.

In the longer term, once we’ve enabled the solution to thrive in the private market, we aim to make it available to public schools - a vast, untapped market. Governments in emerging markets are increasingly looking towards technology and public private partnerships (PPP) to fill in the quality gap in public schools, as the success of Bridge Academies in Africa, and PPPs in Pakistan demonstrates. 

We’ve set up the Taleemabad program in 42 low-fee private schools across 16 locations in Pakistan. These locations are in 3 different provinces. These schools cater to 3000+ students, and employ 300 teachers. The schools have started providing regular revenue which will serve as the basis for long-term sustainability for our organisation.

We have also raised US$1.4 million in grant funding to develop the Taleemabad program so far from funders such as the Malala Fund, Telenor Pakistan, Mulago Foundation, Peery Foundation, GSMA, and others.