Nexus of Good: Foundational stimulus

When Siddhant Sachdeva walked up to receive the Annual Nexus of Good Award, not many were aware of the transformational work being done by him, his partner Azeez Gupta, and his organisation Rocket Learning. Their model is related to Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) which is the need of the hour. The model is being scaled through public-private partnership in the true spirit of nexus of good.

ECCE is one of the 'greatest and most powerful equalisers', according to India's National Education Policy — more than 90 per cent of brain development occurs by this age, and research has continually shown that access to better ECCE is related to lower rates of dropout from school, increased earning potential, and better life outcomes. However, low-income children in India do not have access to any sort of ECCE, either through institutions or through their parents. Public schooling in India at the pre-K level is limited to day-care centres that focus primarily on nutrition rather than cognitive stimulation. At home, parents lack what we refer to as AIM — aspiration to be involved in their children's learning at the foundational level; information that is contextual and usable to educate their children; and the motivation to continue education in a sustained manner. This means that parents are not involved in their children's education, unlike their high-income peers, and Anganwadi workers are limited by inadequate knowledge and perception.

This shows up in dismal educational statistics for children in government and low-cost private schools — 43 per cent of them can't recognise alphabets, and 35 per cent can't recognise numbers 1-9 in grade 1. The inaccessibility of high quality ECCE means that 40 million low-income children in India between 3-6 years of age are becoming inherently less capable, as this lack of stimulation and building of neuronal connections in their early years becomes impossible to change through remedial interventions later in life. Rocket Learning has sought to solve this fundamental inequality by leveraging new-age technology, media, and content.

Rocket Learning's goal is to help India's youngest and poorest children during the most critical 0-8 age group, a period when they build the base for life. The mission towards achieving this goal is to support the nurturing adults (parents and anganwadi workers) in a young child's life with the agency and AIM (Awareness, Information and Motivation) to facilitate the child's early stimulation and learning.

Early childhood education and school readiness was built at scale; connected with the government system, teachers and parents; and change was driven by systemically leveraging technology, media, and social incentives/influencers. This came through two key inter-linked efforts-

1) Creating sustained behavioural change of low-income individuals, leading to regular positive actions over a long period for young children's foundational learning.

2) Understanding, identifying and executing initiatives to develop a high-quality government-run early childhood education system in India — the best in the developing world.

So far, Rocket Learning has created digital communities of 1 million+ children and 70,000+ anganwadi centers and schools in UP, Maharashtra, Haryana, Mumbai, Chandigarh, Delhi and Uttarakhand in partnerships with the state/district governments. Partnerships have also been entered into with the NCERT, Union Ministry of Women and Child Development, MIT-JPAL, MIT Solve, Harvard University and the World Economic Forum. The open-source content repository of videos, audio and worksheets is 1,500+ strong and has received 100 million+ views, reaching 4 million children currently as a public good. Rocket Learning's work has been covered as case studies by Harvard Business School and UNESCO.

Rocket Learning works across primary schools, pre-schools and Anganwadis across India on early childhood care and education. ECCE has been shown to have among the highest Social Return on Investment (SROI) of all impact interventions (USD 13 for every dollar invested). Also, it can unlock opportunity for the low-income child who otherwise would have fallen permanently behind in mental and physical ability by the age of 6/8.

Overall, the goal here is to help "improve the positioning and capacity of the government system to be a high-quality early learning system" — with digital scalability at the core of it.

The implementation plan is composed of three key initiatives:

1. Creating sustained behaviour change of low-income parents, which leads to regular positive actions over a long period of time.

It has been demonstrated that good parent-teacher engagement is possible at scale through the "SHG on WhatsApp model" of vibrant parent- teacher / Anganwadi worker (AWW) communities, by leveraging technology, media and social effects. This is based on the design pillars of a "low-tech WhatsApp front-end, sophisticated back-end", user acquisition and guidance through the trusted govt. teacher/AWW, social peer group influence, two-way personalisation and gamification.

The average child of a treatment group improves test scores by 30 per cent+ and reaches the top third of a control group. Currently, 1MM children across 70,000 classrooms are covered and there are plans to expand to 2.5MM low-income children in 2022-23.

2) Products to help teachers teach more effectively in classrooms:

The currently prevalent model of teacher training (one-time training, huge yearly manuals) is ineffective and outdated. Instead, technology (and WhatsApp) can be used to send modular AV content on a daily basis, helping the teacher understand what to teach every day (and hence be trained experientially), imparting teacher professional development techniques, and increasing her native repository of learning and play activities (rhymes, songs, games, techniques etc.) from 20 to 100. Progress in the form of photos/videos are shared in teacher groups, which become the basis for regular badges; the goal is to have these 1 million+ teachers experientially trained and certified as "pre-school teachers" by 2027.

3. Setting the narrative: advocacy to set the agenda.

As part of the required perception change around the system, both among its internal workers and among parents, new education-focused slogans for government-run childcare institutions are being pushed, and for Padhai Maahs to have the same recall and cache as Poshan Maahs for young children through Anganwadis. This includes their work as members of the ECCE Taskforce instituted by the Central Ministry of Women and Child Development, through which we have helped create the 5-year roadmap for ECCE in India.

Rocket Learning is in a strong position to catalyse ECCE in India, with the already existing factors in favour:

✵ Meaningful, high credibility partnerships — working with central Ministry of Women and Child Development (part of the prestigious national ECCE taskforce), NCERT, NIPCCD. State partnerships with Maharashtra, UP, Chandigarh for systems-level ECCE; with Haryana, UP, Uttarakhand and Delhi for parental engagement in primary grades.

The strategy is to use central initiatives for agenda setting, big bang structural initiatives to set out a playbook for the states, and state partnerships to help them execute on this agenda.

✵ Significant recognition and validation — awards by MIT Solve, World Economic Forum, Forbes 30u30, Business World 40u40, Deloitte's World-Class Education Challenge; subject of a Harvard Business School Case Study, UNESCO and Harvard Ed School study, and Brooking's study

✵ Partnerships with great organisations, including CSF, ACT, Fast Forward, Agency Fund, DRK Foundation, J-PAL, Brookings, EkStep; and strong group of advisors

Views expressed are personal