Nanritam’s Education for All

The Challenge at hand — the WHY

Learning Poverty / Learning Loss threatens nation's future

"Without urgent action to reduce learning poverty, we face a learning and human capital catastrophe. If children do not acquire the basis of literacy together with numeracy and other foundational skills, the futures of hundreds of millions of children around the world, and their societies, are at grave risk."

Joint report by UNESCO, UNICEF, FDCO, USAID AND BMGF

Addressing learning poverty, improving the foundational literacy numeracy (FLN) skill among the vast number of children in rural areas, and in underprivileged urban/semi urban areas, is a critical task of the nation. The historical learning gap has further widened with Covid school closures and the digital gap.

Converted to an Opportunity — the HOW

A Unique innovative approach by empowering grassroot educators

Nanritam, a nonprofit organization, operating from a rural corner — from Baradanga village in Para block, Purulia District, West Bengal took up the challenge. Nanritam runs four major initiatives or verticals:

Under the Education Initiative, Nanritam runs a CBSE affliated English medium secondary school, Filix School of Education. The international award-winning, playful, activity-based and demonstrative pedagogy of Filix School was leveraged to launch Nanritam's most ambitious community out-reach program, Education for All.

The launch of Education for All (EFA), a foundational Literacy and Numeracy program for children the ages of 3-8, was triggered by the catastrophic effects of the extended Covid school closures, in remote rural and underpriviledged communities.

Our Approach

Nanritam through its deep-rooted network in the community (through its Eye Foundation and Covid Relief work), felt the need to urgently addess the learning loss experienced by these underpriviledged communities. It launched its Education for All (EFA) program, to identify, interate and empower various small/ large grassroot educators, from government, private and various NGO learning centers, including committed individuals and police community volunteers.

At some of these remote locations, these unconventional eduators are often the first, if not only, educator resourse for first generation school-goers. Empowering these educators is an important objective of EFA. The program imparts a curriculum, a library of books and videos, and a comprehensive teachers training and empowerment program. All designed to be contextual, sustainable and effective for the children of remote areas.

The program is conducted by in-person residential workshops, as well as continued online training, with a repeating cycle of mutual exchanges, mentoring and reiteration. And of course, all of this is provided FREE to the participants!!

The Impact — the WOW!

Significant impact is visible in remote locations across India that need fast scale up

6000

Teachers Empowered

140,000

Children Benefited

15+

Districts Reached

The program measures directly the skill improvement at the student level. So far, since its launch in Novemeber 2021, around 1400 teachers from more than 15 districts of West Bengal, Bihar and Ladakh, and Kashmir are empowered by this process. Nearly 50,000 children have been positively benefited by the program.

An independent third party organization has completed a full and thorough impact study of the program, confirming the fast skill enhancement of the children, along with a high approval rating from the empowered teachers. A follow up report proposed this program as a potential and powerful model for alleviating learning poverty in the country.

The program is expanding fast and aims to impact 100,000 children per year.

Highlights of the Impact Assessment
Study by C-DRASTA

Principal findings from the Impact Assessment Study of Education for All conducted by the Centre for Development Research, Sustainability and Technical Advancement (C-DRASTA), Kolkata, West Bengal. www.drasta.org

Initial findings reveal an overall positive impact of Nanritam's Education For All programme on fundamental literacy and numeracy skills among children enrolled in the programme.
The improvement is even more pronounced for slightly advanced numeracy and literacy skills, such as vowels, words, sentences, subtraction with borrowing, multiplication, and division.

Teachers under the project confirmed that they had received sufficient training, the objectives of training were explained clearly, and the trainers were extremely encouraging.
The helpfulness of English and Mathematics books designed by Nanritam for foundational literacy and numeracy is one of the strongest features of the EFA teacher training programme. The usefulness of offline classes was also highlighted.
The training programme's content, design, and impact—in terms of instilling confidence in participant teachers about using TLMs in class and teaching more effectively—met the expectations of the teachers.
Comparison of midterm assessment grades for treatment and control group schools shows a marked improvement in numeracy and literacy skills in favor of the treatment schools.