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With a few weeks before my exchange semester at the Indian Institute of Management begins, I decided to spend some time interning for a nonprofit organization in Delhi. With the help of a friend from Stern, I arranged an internship with Pratham, a leading nonprofit working to address educational issues for slum children in 13 states throughout India. Originally founded with a focus on preschool age children, Pratham has now expanded to help children up to age 10 who, for many reasons, have not attended school or are too far behind in their lessons to rejoin their current class. Pratham currently helps around 250,000 children every month, and has reached over one million children in its 10 years of service.
A visit to some of the "classrooms" has been moving. For example, this week I visited a slum area that has risen around Delhi's largest fruit and vegetable wholesale market. As I walked between the boxes of tomatos, apples, and roaming, scavenging cows and pigs, my guide pointed to a small clearing on the cement floor, an area perhaps 8 ft x 8 ft where a class had finished just fifteen minutes before. This was known as the "tomato shed classroom". Families in this area have migrated from Bihar, a poor neighboring state, bringing their children who also end up working in the market. As the children spend their days sorting vegetables from the large trucks or picking up scraps to sell to vendors, they don't have time to go to school. Pratham's solution is to take the school to them, bring the students up to their correct age level and then help them transition back to the government school.
Pratham provides mats for the children to sit on and training and teaching materials for the teacher. The teachers are themselves from the slum areas, and are mostly women, so one of the positive by-products of Pratham's strategy is that the teachers are imbued with a sense of empowerment that often spreads to their friends and families, and in some cases has led to political action on behalf of their communities. Classroom space is always donated (most commonly the teacher donates the use of their home for the class), or free public space is used if necessary (as in the case of the tomato shed), so the strategy keeps Pratham's costs extremely low. Their average cost for a child is Rps 60 per month (~$1.50/child/month).
What is most remarkable is the huge impact that has resulted from a focused, child-by-child approach. Rather than only thinking from the top-down where the complications and numbers needed to get started are often prohibitive to directors and donors alike (there are approximately 350 million children in India --greater than the population of the U.S. - and over 100 million are out of school), Pratham focuses on the small and immediate solution that can be easily replicated at low cost. The small impacts together add up to a large scale success. If Pratham sees one out-of-school child, it asks, are there more? If there are 20 children, it is enough to set up a class. In this way, the infrastructure needed is minimal and flexible enough to respond quickly. Representatives from Pratham introduce themselves to the community, interview potential teachers, and within weeks a class is taking place. In some areas, where "houses" may be demolished at any moment by government slum clearing officials, there is no time to be lost.
Before reaching Delhi, I read the biography of Kalpana Chawla, the first Indian woman to become an astronaut, who unfortunately perished in the space shuttle disaster in February of this year. In it, Kalpana describes her philosophy for success as similar to rock-climbing, in that as she progressed along her path she focused on each successive "hand-hold" and thus slowly, steadily reached the top of the mountain. It is a lesson that Pratham seems to already understand very well: that small, well-thought out steps can often lead to the greatest accomplishments, and that by focusing their reach on each child in need, the landscape of India's children's education may slowly, steadily change beyond everyone's expectations.
Beth Reeves is a graduate student at NYU Stern School of Business and co-founder of the Stern Non-Profit Association, a student club focused on the non-profit sector (www.stern.nyu.edu/~snpa). She is currently in India and will be studying for one semester at IIM-Ahmedabad. Please feel free to contact her with any questions/comments at bdr206@stern.nyu.edu
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