Tell us about Pratham: Its history, its strategy, and its main accomplishments to date.
Pratham started in Mumbai about 20 years ago. Then and now, our vision has been to ensure that every child is in school and learning well. Then it was Mumbai. Now it is India. We work directly with communities and schools, and also in partnership with governments and others in the pursuit of this vision.
In the early years we followed some basic organizing principles. Surprisingly, many of them are as relevant today as they were twenty years ago. We believe that citizens need to understand the problems the communities and children face in education. Based on this understanding, citizens and governments, people from all walks of life need to work together to find solutions for basic problems. In Pratham, we have always looked for methods and models that can generate impact on scale. Our desire and ambition to work on scale has led us to look for strategies that are low cost, effective, replicable, and can be carried out by ordinary people.
We are convinced that “doing” is one of the best ways of learning. We constantly use measurement and evidence as well as the learnings from our experience on the ground in charting our way forward. We have always been curious about how best to use the resources that we have to maximize change. In this process, we have constantly looked for mechanisms to improve our own capabilities, for ways to open up new opportunities for trying things differently. In our view continuous experimentation is essential to keep up with changing contexts and challenges old and new.
Today we work in 21 out of 29 states in India. In 2013-2014 our programs reached close to 5 million children. We run a variety of interventions from early childhood through elementary school to youth skills and second chance programs. However we are best known for the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) and for our Read India program that helps millions of children gain basic skills in reading and arithmetic.
This year Pratham turns 20. Of all the things we have done in the last 20 years, I want to talk about two. The first is ASER – Annual Status of Education Report. In India, school enrolment for the age group 6 to 14 is well above 96%. However, many children even after several years in school lack basic skills like reading and arithmetic. Over the 10 years of its existence, ASER has moved discussions and debates in education beyond inputs and infrastructure to the issue of children’s learning. ASER collects data for a representative sample of children from every state and almost every rural district in India. ASER reaches over 560 districts each year, surveying an average of 650,000 children in more than 16,000 villages across the country. The survey is conducted by a local organization or institution in each district. Every year more than 25,000 people are involved in the exercise. This unique model of citizen engagement has been acknowledged as being a path breaker both in India and abroad.
Our second accomplishment has to do with how we help children learn. In the last ten years, we have developed a model which can be best described as “teaching at the right level”. Here we focus on children in Grade 3, 4 and 5 who do not have basic reading and math skills. (In a typical primary school in India, about half the children in Grade 5 do not the skills expected in Grade 2). In about 100 hours of instructional time, we can bring 60 to 70% of these children to the stage where they can read simple text fluently and do basic arithmetic operations. The effectiveness of this learning improvement intervention has been assessed rigorously by independent evaluators.1 So while we have helped to uncover a major problem in education, we have also been able to develop a scalable solution.