Pratham was established as a Public Charitable Trust in 1994 by the Commissioner of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, UNICEF and several of the country’s prominent citizens. It started out providing pre-school education to the children of the Mumbai slums, where temples, offices and private homes were mobilized for use. Volunteers were recruited, trained, equipped with learning material, and encouraged to set up classes in any available space within the community. Soon this program, known as Pratham Balwadis, was being replicated in multiple locations.
A few years later, the organization created the Balshaki program aimed at remedial education of in-school children who lag behind in basic literacy numeracy. It started an urban bridge school program for out-of-school children, whom it sought to bring to a minimum learning level before mainstreaming them into schools. Between 1999 and 2001, Pratham expanded its operations to nineteen cities and began an outreach program dealing with child labor.
Pratham firmly believes in working with state and local governments to bring about change. Its volunteer programs aim to supplement and not supplant the work of teachers in the public school system, while its organization rests on a partnership between government, the corporate sector and citizens. In many cities, corporate leaders have taken the lead, the government has responded by opening its schools and sharing its facilities, and community volunteers, mostly young women from the slums, have helped implement the programs.
The organization’s strategy ensures that its educational improvement activities reach even the country’s remotest and most violence-stricken areas. The models applied are deliberately low-cost so that they can be deployed anywhere and scaled up to achieve maximum impact.
Pratham subjects its programs to close and continual assessment. An effort which led it to make two major changes in 2002-2003. The first was a delivery strategy based on areas or bastis, whereby communities of approximately 250 to 300 households (about 250 children) are earmarked for intervention. This creates a situation where the only way a child can drop out is if he or she migrates elsewhere, avoiding the kind of scattergun approach that undermines efficiency. As we write, Pratham is working with about 300,000 children in 32 cities.
The second was the launch of Learn to Read program with an accelerated technique that can demonstrably boost the learning levels of 84% of children in less than 8 weeks. Classes were given by volunteers, making for a low-cost solution that is also replicable on a national scale. After their experience they considered that trying to teach children of the same age but different levels is an obstacle to progress. Pratham accordingly groups them by their actual learning level so no child gets left behind.
Speech
Development Cooperation 6th edition
By the late 1990s, the members of NGO Pratham, whose mission is to provide India’s most disadvantaged children with access to education, were considerably demoralized. Their pupils were not learning at the expected rate. The team, recalls CEO Madhav Chavan, were “beginning to believe that fast and visible change was just not possible.” But this impasse also forced them to do some serious thinking: “If we could bring about an ‘overnight’ change on a mass scale, we would galvanize the whole school establishment. What if there was a magic wand that could get children to read quickly?”
Now, some fifteen years later, Pratham is teaching millions of children to read, write and perform basic arithmetic in a short time frame. The organization — motto ‘All children in school and learning well’ — is the latest entry to the roll of BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge laureates in the Development Cooperation category. There is still, of course, “a long way to go,” as Chavan admits. The starting point is a country where 287 million people are unable to read or write. But Pratham has discovered, perhaps not a magic wand, but certainly a highly effective method to boost children’s learning. A method applied in a way that is keenly responsive to the social reality of its target — severely disadvantaged children — thanks to the efforts of thousands of volunteers and an effective assessment system. Pratham’s model is now being successfully exported to other world areas.
Pratham was set up as a Public Charitable Trust in 1994 by the municipal authorities of Greater Mumbai, with the involvement of UNICEF and seven of the country’s prominent citizens. Today, its programs in India reach three million children each year in 20,000 villages and 19 states, with half a million annually subjected to assessment.
One of its key innovations is conceptual in nature: to focus on what children really know. So what exactly were children learning in the country’s schools? Posing this question brought to light a major contradiction: even with a school enrolment rate of over 95 percent, many children were just not learning. In 2003, Chavan wrote: “On average 50 percent of school-going children in government schools do not know the 3 Rs even after four years of schooling. This is the most visible and demoralizing comment on the status of education in India.”
Hence the challenge for Pratham, from the outset, has been less to get children into school than to make them literate and numerate. Pratham started out providing pre-school education to the children of the Mumbai slums. To get round the lack of funding, any space in the community, whether temple, office or private home, was turned to classroom use, while teams of volunteers were trained and equipped with teaching materials. Soon this program, known as Pratham Balwadisor pre-school classes, had expanded its reach and was being replicated in other locations. Next came the Bridge programs aimed at out-of-school children, whom they sought to mainstream into schools, and Balsakhi—the children’s friend — for in-school children who had fallen behind and were at risk of dropping out. Many of these pupils were the first literate members of their families, who were therefore not able to help them with school work.
Between 1999 and 2001, Pratham expanded into other cities and set up programs for working children. But they were still short of achieving the desired impact, and advance could be painfully slow. Chavan reflects on this period: “In Pratham classes children made progress, but the learning achievement was less than desired. Pratham was not improving system efficiency to any visible extent.” It was then that they decided to find a more effective teaching method. A group of educators would meet each month to discuss a particular goal and the means to achieve it, and report back the next month on how things had gone.
Soon one such experiment produced results, only in arithmetic rather than reading. The idea was to abandon the sequential model of traditional education — first you learn the numbers, then addition-subtraction, etc. — in favor of an integrated approach. “Everything we tried out was strictly based on our observation of children. And we realized that it was when playing in the streets that they learned most,” Chavan explains. Their conclusion was that children don’t learn games rule by rule, but directly, by taking part. “So why not treat mathematics as a game?” They devised a method in which children count and calculate from the outset. In practice, this involved them playing with straws while performing four activities: saying numbers out loud, manipulating the straws, reading the numbers, and writing them down. The results of this “say-do-read-write” were astonishing; in less than a month, the children knew their numbers and could add and subtract with carry over.
The next challenge was to develop an equivalent method for reading, based on the principle that skills acquisition snowballs when a child engages in interconnected activities. Pratham has used this insight in a “game” where children attempt to read from the very first day, and, in most cases, manage to read for real in fewer than eight weeks. This methodology has been given the name Learn to Read. “We demonstrated that learning can quickly be improved using a low-cost model replicable on a national scale,” states Pratham on its website. Another innovation was a delivery strategy based on areas or ‘bastis’, comprising communities of up to 300 households. This helps prevent both program abandonment — a child can only drop out by moving elsewhere — and the dispersal of effort.
As we write, Pratham works in 4,000 bastis in 43 cities, in close coordination with state and local authorities, so its volunteers supplement rather than supplant the work of teachers in the public system.
A big part of Pratham’s success lies in its assessment program. In 2004, it published its first “Annual Status of Education Report” (ASER or ‘impact’ in Hindustani), based on surveys of 700,000 children in 16,000 villages by 30,000 volunteers. The results are a reliable indicator of the real progress of Indian school children. The first report, published in 2005, revealed that only 15 percent of children in primary grade 2 and 25 percent in grade 3 could read a grade 1 text. These statistics spurred the launch of Read India, a major campaign using the Learn to Read methodology rolled out in partnership with national government. In 2008 alone, Read India reached 33 million children.
With time, Pratham has widened its target to include young people who have dropped out of school, whom it offers vocational training for hospitality and other industries, plus courses in English and IT skills. Its goals are, if anything, more ambitious than ever — not just learning to read, but reading to learn.
