Education For All (EFA Program)

We aim to address the stark gap between school enrollment and learning in rural India. Ironically, while Indian students and workers have pursued top class globally acclaimed higher education institutions around the world, India’s vast underprivileged majority, particularly in the remote areas, lack basic education and foundational literacy numeracy knowledge. India has the world’s second largest higher education system with over 58,000 higher education institutions (All India Survey of Higher Education, 2021-22). There are now 43.3 million students enrolled for higher education, up by ~2 million students in one year. Yet, India is still a lower middle income country according to the World Bank with an average GDP per capita of around $2500. One of the key realizations is that while a small fraction of the Indian population, driven by technology and service industry has prospered, a vast majority, of around 55%, particularly in rural India is not integrated into that main economic engine of the country. Beyond attempting to close the learning gap, we also try to solve the problem of social integration of socio-economically disadvantaged children. Despite near-universal school enrollment in India, a significant gap persists between participation and educational achievement. Many students struggle to attain basic literacy and numeracy even after completing elementary school (Muralidharan et al., 2019). This gap raises questions about the efficacy of traditional supply-side interventions, including teacher training, with widely mixed results shown in previous research (Popova et al., 2022). At the same time, recent findings on the effectiveness of demand-side measures aimed at enhancing student engagement through bolstering confidence, motivation, and aspirations show small but promising results (Bernard et al., 2019). To steer larger  India towards equitable prosperity, unlocking the potential of  India’s historic demographic dividend with higher productivity is a must.

 As the technology and knowledge driven economy is going to define the future of all economic activities, preparing and empowering this vast majority with education is probably the most important challenge for future India.

Our proposed solution is Nanritam’s Education For All (EFA) program which aims to train, empower and enable teachers at the grassroots with modern pedagogy, content and continuous mentorship. The program uses a hybrid teacher training model, combining in-person workshops every 2-3 months with weekly online sessions for 8-12 months. The key features of the solution are as follows: 

• The content of the teacher training is based on Nanritam’s pedagogical and content research organization, Filix School of Education (FSE). FSE conducts research, integrates it with existing evidence, and develops world-class pedagogy and content knowledge in collaboration with national and international experts in the field. 

• The program invites educators and volunteers from participating institutions (e.g., government schools, private schools, learning centres, etc.) for in-person workshops at FSE. In the case in which there are multiple teachers at an institution, Nanritam follows a cascading model and trains the nodal teacher in person, who then delivers the training to the rest of the teachers. The program recognizes participating educators’ unfamiliarity with the content and digital inadequacies, and therefore, puts a significant weight on the in-person training component. 

• EFA has also recognized the need for a cost-effective and fit-to-purpose EdTech tool to proliferate the program to the remotest corners. Therefore, EFA has created its own AI-enabled FiliBOT platform to deliver content and training to all teachers online. EFA’ EdTeach Platform, FiliBOT allows the tracking of each child’s progress along with continuous support provision to the teachers even after the in-person workshops. FiliBOT is currently in the implementation phase. Here is the link to the video of our product demo: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19lo_dBx6RLUPAdpyFecEGszWwbLJ2xzZ?usp=sharing

The target population are teachers from remote villages and under-privileged sub urban areas in India. We train formal school teachers and a vast number of informal teachers and community volunteers. Training informal teachers and volunteers are crucial in our setting because they are often the only interface of providing initial education to the remote rural children through various learning centers and private initiatives. With consistent training, monitoring, and follow-ups, we are empowering them with digital literacy and teaching skills using modern pedagogy. 

The need to improve the foundational education of children in rural India is well-documented (ASER -rural 2022 by Pratham, The State of Global Learning Poverty by UNICEF). In the communities we work with, large numbers of students are struggling to overcome learning poverty. Most of them cannot access quality education since their households are often unable to support them - most of the children we work with have illiterate parents. 

 Impacting lives:

1. Enabling and empowering these students with quality education and digital literacy can unlock huge potential for economic progress. Some students have gone on to move out of their village to pursue post-secondary education

 2. Once they are equipped with foundational literacy skills, they feel more integrated with a bigger community outside of their village and feel encouraged to pursue higher education.

3. The program aims to bring thousands of educators from remote rural areas across India under an umbrella for sharing and exchanging experiences. This provides a unique networking platform and encourages grassroot change-makers, who would have otherwise never realized this peer collaboration potential. Many volunteers and informal teachers, after gaining training, empowerment and support from the EFA program, have started their own learning centers in remote areas and even on railway platforms for destitute children.

 4. Integration with Nanritam also makes families aware of government welfare programs that they are eligible for (but did not take up before). In extremely remote communities, women work together with Nanritam to collectively ensure that the kids attend school/learning centers.

Nanritam is an organization built bottom up, with its roots firmly planted in the community. With over twenty years of experience in serving rural communities through the composite intervention of health, education, and rural livelihood, we have technical expertise, social engineering experience, credibility, and, above all, community trust to design and deliver the right intervention models with proper implementation metrics.

The Education for All (EFA) program was launched with active bottom-up interest and demand from the rooted community network of Nanritam. They approached Nanritam to help with some education programs, as the acute issue of learning poverty had further deepened through the Covid school closures and digital divide in these communities.

Regarding this specific education intervention, we have expertise and experience of more than ten years. We have a Central Board of Secondary Education affiliated school in rural India (Purulia, West Bengal), Filix School of Education, where we research, implement, and tailor best international practices with children representing students of typical rural India. We are leveraging the methods and experience of Filix School to remote areas without compromising quality. The success of Filix School in the last ten years not only gives us the confidence that this will work in the villages that we are targeting but also gives us the guarantee of a consistent supply of experienced trainers and renewal of appropriate lesson plans going forward.  

Lastly, we tailor the training and coaching depending on the school needs (for example, more follow-up for informal teachers, develop the edTech solution so that it can be displayed in a cell phone or even displayed with a projector and screen in a remote classroom by a cost effective device avoiding expensive smart TVs).

Nanritam is practicing an education intervention in the rural community through Filix School of Education. The school has established itself as a quality education center in Purulia, West Bengal through its outstanding all-round performance of students from the remote rural communities. During Covid, we realized the demand for broader intervention in education, which germinated the birth of our community outreach program, Education For All (EFA). Academics around the world have participated in our symposiums. Link to Dr. Kaushik Basu’s lecture on game theory in our EFA Symposium - Game theory with class 9 and 10 students at Filix School by Prof Kaushik Basu. 

 So far the EFA program has developed and implemented a teachers’ training and empowerment program of duration eight to ten months. The intervention model includes curriculum, books, training videos, periodic in-person residential workshops and weekly online training. Student’s performance and progress are tracked through periodic assessments starting with a baseline assessment. 

 C-DRASTA (Centre for Development Research, Sustainability, and Technical Advancement) has documented the strong effectiveness and efficacy of the intervention, through an impact study involving a sample of 2,500 students. Link to the full report can be found here:

 C-Drasta EFA impact study report - highlights.pdf

 In 26 months since the launch, this program has empowered around 2300 teachers/educators in remote areas in five states of India, impacting more than 65,000 children. The program has also developed a proprietary Ed Tech platform to deliver content, assessment tracking and monitoring of the progress.

We strongly feel that through our last two years of effort and successful results across various remote geographies, cultural and social structures in India, we have an effective product and intervention model that has the potential to address a critical educational need in India. Our goal is to proliferate and scale up the implementation without compromising quality.

Essentially, we will need and utilize funds to reach that goal. The main areas where the fund would be directed are further developing and increasing access to the Ed Tech tool and organizing in-person workshops to train the beneficiaries in the training content and digital literacy. Additionally, Solve's expertise would allow us to continue improving and developing the Ed Tech platform and learn about the best measurement practices to incorporate into our daily functioning. 

Lastly, we believe our product could be a perfect fit to provide a solution to the larger developing world, where learning poverty is a critical issue and SDG 2030 goal. The last area of expanding the scale-up would be to find collaborators outside India and position the product and model in those networks. Solve is an excellent platform to learn from similar projects elsewhere and build a network to start growing in that direction.

Unlike many existing solutions aimed at closing the learning gap, our approach integrates both supply and demand side aspects. Our solution recognizes the demand for improved pedagogical knowledge and technology of the broad community. To improve the supply side of trained educators, the program involves both formal teachers and informal teachers and volunteers, who are often the only interface to bring education to remote children. To maximize access to a large number of recipients, the program collaborates with various government and NGO partners and large organized volunteer groups. We carefully identify barriers to effective implementation – monitoring costs, digital literacy, and variation in local languages across communities. We are able to sustainable work around these problems by working with the local community, leveraging smartphone proliferation in India, and training formal and informal teachers with strong local ties. We conduct periodic in-person workshops and regular weekly online training schedules. To encourage sustained peer effects, we identify anchor teachers from institutions or learning centers. Using anchor teachers as the nodal point of connection with local schools and learning centers, we work towards integrating digital literacy training within the school curriculum. This outlook has made our solution sustainable and cost-effective.

Many of the communities we work with live in highly remote areas where regular in-person monitoring can be costly. We make use of Whatsapp groups where teachers upload photos and videos of their sessions with students. Whatsapp works as a monitoring device because of high smartphone penetration in rural India (ASER 2021) is complementary to less-frequent in-person monitoring visits.

We are also developing an EdTech tool for schools to continue accessing updated EFA content material even after the end of the training program. We ensure that rural teachers are empowered in the process of familiarizing themselves with technology in a fun and engaging way. The EdTech tool is made to infer the difficulty level of assessments that individual students can keep up with. The tool also allows teachers to keep track of student grades and can observe in real time the effect they have on their student academic outcomes.

Nanritam’s EFA program trains teachers on modern pedagogy and content and teaches them how to use various technology tools, increasing their digital literacy, expanding their teaching skills, and empowering them. This should translate into better classroom quality, positively impacting students' learning and raising their aspirations. In turn, this can affect student’s education decisions (e.g., enrolling in post-secondary education) and longer-term outcomes.

Our overall goal is to empower Indian children, particularly in rural areas, with education.  This can become a true transformational opportunity for India by taking full advantage of its demographic dividend. 

Our goals directly relate to the following SDG 2030 goals:  

• SDG 4.6. By 2030 ensure all youth and a substantial proportion of men and women achieve literacy and numeracy

• SDG 4.4. Substantially increase the numbers of youth and adults with skills for employment and entrepreneurship

• SDG Target 4.C By 2030 substantially increase the supply of qualified teachers including through international collaboration for such training. 

• SDG Target 8.6 Promote youth employment, education and training

  • Expand productive capacities for sustainable development and embrace new technologies

• Goal 17 Partnership for the goals. We are partnering and collaborating at all levels to drive our objective.

To measure our progress and impact, we are currently collecting information on: 

1. Number of children impacted. 

2. Number of teachers getting empowered with our training. 

3. Quality of teaching. Twice a month (or more frequently if there’s demand), there is a Zoom meeting with the teachers to discuss any problems or difficulties they have encountered with the new material. 

4. Student outcomes. Students are evaluated at baseline on Math and reading. They are evaluated again 2-3 times within a year. This information is recorded in the EdTech platform and can be accessed at any time (before it was saved on paper). The EdTech platform has facilitated this process and has made it systematic and easier to implement.

We empower rural teachers by familiarizing them with new apps like google sheets and zoom which are used for follow-up teacher training sessions and frequent check-ins. The teachers are mostly familiar with Whatsapp (this requires low bandwidth) which we use for continuous monitoring. We have developed an AI powered platform to track student performance over time, link schools, teachers, and students with unique identifiers, and act as a learning platform which can detect different pronunciations for teaching conversational english, teach math adaptively (by difficulty level that the student is comfortable with) etc. We aim to complement in-person training with  technologically-enable monitoring and continued access to interactive learning material through our EdTech platform.

There are ~15 people from Nanritam on this program:  

• 2 team leaders in charge of day-to-day coordination and partnerships (education institutions and other collaborators)  

• 1 tech person. 

• 7-8 teachers leading workshops and follow-up of teachers. 

• 5-6 community coordinators in charge of supervising implementation of the program, helping with exams.  The main Nanritam center (Filix School) serves as a research center for the EFA program.

There are volunteers (e.g., Indian academics working abroad come to teach classes), and education partners.  We have partnered with other institution types, including the Education Department of Ladakh, community police groups, and individual learning centers.

We have been working on our solution with communities in and around Purulia, West Bengal, for more than 10 years. We are leveraging the methods and experience of teachers working in the CBSE-affiliated Filix School in Purulia, West Bengal to remote areas without compromising quality.

Nanritam aims to bring inclusive and quality education to students in regions lacking economic resources. About half of our board members, including our Secretary are women, with the entire team comprising people with different religious affiliations, caste backgrounds, socio-economic levels, and educational backgrounds. All of our trainers and 50% of individuals being trained in the EFA program are women with varied socio-economic backgrounds. Our community outreach coordinators and other members are mostly from rural communities with strong ties to local tribes as well. We understand and appreciate the value of the local community’s support in formulating the teacher training curriculum, implementing, and improving our understanding of the challenges they face, and what are feasible ways to tackle the same. We practice a very open respectful working environment.   

As part of our global team, we have partnered with four Economics PhD students from UC San Diego to rigorously evaluate our impact. Two of them are from India, with a good understanding of the context. They all have field work experience from education-related projects from different research centers (Development Data Lab, IADB-Latin America, J-PAL). 

To rapidly proliferate and build momentum of our program implementation, we are pursuing various collaboration models. In particular, we are partnering with various organizations, who already have direct access to a large number of teachers, educators, volunteers and students who are looking to improve and implement quality education for those students. For example, we have partnerships with the government education department in UT Ladakh, a remote state, various NGOs with a large number of learning centers in various states and large organized volunteer groups, like community police networks. 

We provide in-person training for teachers on experiential learning and the use of technology (such as Google Sheets and Zoom), and remotely monitor them using WhatsApp.  Our training content is built on best international practices, that we tailor to our context (primarily rural India) leveraging on the methods and experience of Filix School. 

We have also now built a proprietary EdTech platform to further ensure consistent and efficient delivery of our training modules with effective assessment and tracking of the progress at students’ level.  Content in the EdTech platform is continuously updated. Teachers, students and parents can continue accessing the platform after the end of our training.  

Education quality in the villages we are reaching is very low. In many cases, informal institutions are the only education these children have access to, and teachers/community volunteers in these institutions have no teaching experience.

Our end goal is to make the program self-sustaining. Currently, the program is funded by donations from individuals and partnering organizations (Nanritam board members and a few large private donor foundations from India and the US). In the long run, contracts with private schools/institutions seeking teacher training solutions (the EdTech platform and proprietary books) will provide most of the required funding to cover expenses. Demand for low-fee (tier 2/3) private schools in India has been growing. We are currently working with PhD students at UC San Diego to evaluate the program rigorously. The evaluation, along with a cost-benefit analysis, should facilitate scaling up and sustain funding from public and private sector donors and/or investors. 

We are also encouraging the individual training recipients to become edu entrepreneurs and start their small private learning centers as a business, leveraging our content and support at a very small cost. This could be a win-win sustainable model as well.

Evidence - we have been successfully operating and expanding the program under our current financing scheme for more than 10 years. We have established credibility and collaborations with state governments, multiple NGOs, and have received continuous support from academics from institutions like UC San Diego, Cornell, etc.