Rocket Learning

Rocket Learning is India’s leading EdTech nonprofit catalyzing systems change and community engagement in public early childhood education (ECE). Rocket Learning empowers parents and community daycare workers through the Indian government system by using technology, media, and social influence techniques, creating vibrant digital communities where children can learn.
Through their collaboration with the Indian government to implement the nation’s first universal ECE policy, Rocket Learning directly impacts over 2.5 million students daily across 100,000+ digital communities comprised of parents and daycare center workers.

The Problem
Quality early childhood education (ECE) ensures school readiness, substantial increases in school completion and lifelong earnings, and time freed up for parents (especially women) to enter formal employment. Yet, over 35 million low-income children in India cannot access quality ECE. Public schooling in India at the pre-K level is limited to daycare centers that focus on nutrition and health care rather than cognitive stimulation. Low-income parents and community workers often need support in building “AIM”: Awareness to be involved in children’s learning at the foundational level, Information that is contextual and usable, and Motivation to be engaged at the sustained levels necessary for adequate cognitive stimulation.

This shows up in dismal educational statistics: in grade one, 43% of low-income children cannot recognize alphabets, and 35% cannot recognize numbers one through nine. The inaccessibility of high-quality ECE means that each year, 35 million low-income children in India between three to six years of age are becoming less capable. This lack of stimulation and building of fewer neuronal connections in their early years becomes increasingly difficult to address through remedial interventions later in life.

The Solution
Rocket Learning builds early childhood and foundational learning at scale using technology, community, and government. They deliver short, contextualized content in local languages to 2.5 million children and over 150,000+ preschool educators daily via government-anchored WhatsApp groups. Rocket Learning uses these teacher-parent messaging groups to send academic content and nudges that build aspiration through group effects. Their technology sends daily information, and stores and analyzes responses. This enables preschool teachers to obtain regular guidance on how to stimulate their students through activity-based learning. Equally critically, low-income parents, especially mothers, build the confidence and knowledge to engage with their children while doing learning activities at home. This results in improvements in the child’s abilities and learning; increases in teaching skills, accountability, and motivation; and changes in caregiver knowledge and confidence for home learning and engagement with school.

An HBS case study highlights how Rocket Learning is on track to impact 10 million children within the next five years due to three key factors. First, they rely on simple front-end technology, building on Whatsapp and YouTube, which are widely available on even the most basic smartphones. Secondly, they leverage the government system, and have helped the Indian government launch an extensive ECE policy for 1.3 million existing daycare centers and have become primary partners at national and state levels (10 states) in executing it. Lastly, their solution is highly cost-effective: the cost per classroom is less than $10/year.