MIT Solve

Organization & Team Lead Details

Project Details

Describe the product or program that is the focus of your proposed LEAP project.

The pandemic has led to about 4.7 Cr children dropping out of school in India, an almost 1.5x increase in out-of-school children from pre-COVID times due to disrupted learning and household income losses. The pandemic has proven to be not just a health crisis but also an education crisis. The nonprofit sector in India is at the forefront of the last-mile delivery of socio-economic welfare to the most underserved children, with one nonprofit for every 400 citizens. However, the pandemic has threatened the sustenance of a majority of nonprofits. Nonprofits are struggling to respond to this education crisis due to disrupted program funding, acute capacity crunch caused by layoffs and hiring freezes, and a lack of strategic partnerships to collate and optimize resources. We hope to tackle this by building a collaborative service delivery network called the Social Franchising Network. We enable out-of-school children, sustainable access to the right to education by anchoring a collaborative service delivery network - The Social Franchising Network - where critical success factors of a mature nonprofit’s (SOCIAL FRANCHISOR) proven impact model are adopted and executed by a collective of young nonprofits (SOCIAL FRANCHISEES) with overlapping missions for rapid scaling within their communities.

This is our pilot year of testing the network and its efficiency to move the needle and accelerate the impact on out-of-school children. The network’s intervention involves identifying the out-of-school child from the target communities, enrolling the out-of-school child in an accessible school, working on the out-of-school child’s foundational literacy and numeracy skills, and retaining the child within the school system. However, the approach adopted this year is primarily focused on improving access to schools and educational spaces for out-of-school children (never enrolled or dropped out of school ) and At-risk children ( enrolled and not attending) and retaining them within these learning spaces.

Select the key characteristics of your target population. Select all that apply.

Primary school children (ages 5-12)
Rural
Low-Income
Minorities & Previously Excluded Populations

In which countries do you currently operate?

India

In which countries do you plan to be operating within the next year?

India

How have you worked with affected communities to design your solution?

The intervention adopted by the SOCIAL FRANCHISING NETWORK from the SOCIAL FRANCHISOR is a proven model that has been successfully scaled to impact more than 2.2 million out-of-school children within various marginalized districts in India. And currently, we are pilot-testing the intervention to reach out-of-school children and at-risk children with our action research team and younger non-profits within the network with an appetite to scale and drive larger impact in the coming years. Our Action research team constitutes of individuals who hail from the selected geography and have a deeper understanding of the sociocultural realities and barriers to education within the community. They play a pivotal role in directing and micro-innovating the pilot intervention for optimal outcomes.

What is your theory of change?

Our theory of change is to bring together a mature nonprofit (SOCIAL FRANCHISOR) with a sustainable and replicable model proven to work at scale and younger mission-aligned nonprofits (SOCIAL FRANCHISEES) in target communities with an appetite for scale. We subsequently identify critical success factors for knowledge transfer and translation of the replicable model to the social franchising network and offer support to the younger non-profits (SOCIAL FRANCHISEES) in contextualizing and iterating the model within their communities by giving access to money, talent, proven knowledge, cross-learning spaces and insights through direct implementation (ACTION RESEARCH). Through the network, we hope to mainstream 30% of the out-of-school children population in target Districts and regularize 50% of the At-Risk population within schools.

How are you currently using evidence within your theory of change?

The pilot (SOCIAL FRANCHISING NETWORK with the adopted intervention) we are currently implementing is proof of concept in the making and will form the evidence base for our proposed theory of change. The pilot design involved rigorous secondary evidence gathering for the selection of target geographies and the replicable model.

How are you currently tracking and measuring your solution’s impact?

The key indicators that track the cumulative impact generated by the network (Action Research Team + Social Franchisees) are as follows:

Number of out of school children enrolled in school
Number of out of school children retained within schools
% of grade-ready children
Cost per child (Identification to Retention)

One-line project summary:

WE enable out-of-school children, sustainable and accelerated access to the right to education by applying principles of Social Franchising.

What is your solution’s stage of development?

Pilot

LEAP Project Pitch

Pitch your LEAP project: How and where would integrating evidence (or stronger evidence) into your theory of change increase your organization’s impact?

Research Question & Objective:

A mission-critical research question that we are trying to answer as an organization is: Which 2-3 processes if made more efficient, will help unlock scale for our young nonprofit partners? This will help us sharply focus our energies on strengthening 2-3 processes within a young nonprofit (for e.g. Performance Management, Pedagogical Training, Fundraising etc.) that can yield maximum outcomes for the program.

Context:

TAP India Foundation plays the role of anchoring the Social Franchising Network. We partner with young nonprofits who are committed to solving the problem of out-of-school children in their respective geographies at scale. The partnership with a young nonprofit lasts for about 5 years (1+2+2).

Y1: Pressure test the organization’s capacity and commitment to outcome delivery.

Y2-Y3: Enable the organization to mainstream at least 10k out-of-school children

Y4-Y5: Enable the organization to saturate 40-50% of its target geography during Y4 & Y5 and 90% of its target geography, independently, over the next 2-5 years.

Potential Deliverables:

We want to understand which org process/es will have a direct bearing on the goals for Y1, Y2-Y3 and Y4-Y5 and beyond. Some potential deliverables that will be helpful for us:

Priority 1:

Which organizational processes to focus on in Y1 or a method to help us derive the same?
Which organizational processes to focus on in Y2-Y3 or a method to help us derive the same?

Priority 2:

Which organizational processes to focus on in Y4-Y5 & beyond or a method to help us derive the same?

How will LEAP help strengthen the 5-year mission?

If LEAP Fellows can help us narrow down on organizational capabilities that are most critical for impact in the different phases of partner engagement and beyond, it will help the Network:

Allocate talent and monies better
Exponentially increase its coverage of out-of-school children and set it up strongly to achieve its 5-year goal of identifying, enrolling, bridging learning gaps and retaining 30% of the out-of-school children population (300k) in 2 high-concentration (>4 OoSC per 100 children) States of India.