Pratham

Pratham is a network of non-governmental organisations that promote primary education for disadvantaged children. Started in Mumbai in 1994, with the support of UNICEF, it now has activities in 14 states of India and has supporting organisations in the US and UK.

The remedial learning programmes of Pratham in government schools, unlike many other education efforts worldwide, have been proven to work through careful evaluations. Its initiatives are reaching 200,000 children a year.

Pratham also operates in the USA, having begun almost simultaneously in Houston and in New York.

History

The challenge now was to prove that a non-governmental initiative can work on massive scale. The first major thrust was to start the Balwadi program- pre-school centres in Mumbai. Even though there was an existing Municipal model of running pre-school centers it remained on a small scale in spite of a huge need. The existing Municipal pre-school centre model was tweaked to take it to a larger scale.

The initial problem faced in running the project was the availability of space in Mumbai. So, there was no place to run these “Balwadis”. Then Madhav Chavan applied of Lau Tsu’s teachings, which states go to the people, love them, learn from them, start with what they know, build on what they have and when it is done they will say they did it ourselves. He and his team applied to the community to provide the space. It didn’t matter if it was a temple, a mosque or some party office. The classes ran at those places and community decided what’s best for them. The Pratham team trained people, who were selected by the community, for teaching. So, “starting from the things which the community already has and building upon it” phenomenon became the key to Pratham’s success.

Read India Campaign

In the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) survey report facilitated by Pratham, it reported that in a sample of 704,000 children in 2006 , almost 47% of schooling children in grade 5 could not read the story text that were of the difficulty level in grade 2. As for arithmetic, 55% of grade 5 and 25% of grade 8 children could not solve a simple division problem. Due to the significant proportion of children who were illiterate, Read India Campaign was launched on a national scale in 2007 to narrow the disparity in literacy rate between rural and urban India. This was backed up by studies conducted in the states of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh which showed that improvements can be executed on a large scale. This initiative was Pratham’s flagship project in attempting to improve reading and basic arithmetic skills of children aged 6-14 years old in rural India. The project’s objectives were to ensure that all grade 1 children know alphabets and numbers, all grade 2 children can read words and do simple arithmetic, and all grade 3 and 4 children can read simple texts fluently and confidently solve arithmetic problems.

In the period 2008-2009, Read India Campaign covered about 50% of the villages in India and reached out to 33 million children. More than 600,000 teachers/ officials/ government workers were trained to specialize in accelerated learning methodologies. The success of Read India Campaign is evidenced by the improvement in learning levels of all children by at least 20%. With the success of Read India Campaign, Read India Campaign 2 will also be launched, targeting on subject specific and grade specific content for children of grade 4 to 8. It will also provide children aged 14-16 years old with academic support to complete their secondary school certification exam. This paves the opportunity to further reduce the literacy gap between rural and urban areas of India.

Further reading

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External links

Category:Non-profit organisations based in India