Rocket Learning
Model & Strategy
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.
Namya built her impact philosophy when leading SEWA’s (India’s largest community organization) cooperative federation in Gujarat, including their childcare cooperatives and advocacy work in childcare. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School. “In India, poverty is just so pervasive. You have to make a decision early in life on whether to wholly ignore it or wholly engage with it; there is no middle way. So I knew from an early age that I ultimately wanted to work on social impact”. Namya strongly believes that communities, when given agency, can come together as a powerful force for social good.
An alum of IIT Delhi and Harvard Business School, Azeez was at McKinsey before a stint in the senior leadership at Pratham, one of India’s largest educational organizations. Azeez comes from a family of civil servants, and his dinner table conversations from childhood revolved around social problems, but even more about India’s potential. He believes in education as the most effective route to empowerment, and in the power of partnership between governments, civil societies, the private sector, and people.
Impact
Currently, 2.5 million children are reached daily through over 100,000 digital communities across 10 states, and Rocket Learning expects to reach 3.5 million children daily by the end of 2024.
In each community cohort, the average child gains essential school-readiness skills and ranks in the top 30% of their class.
Parents double the time they spend with children on learning, and teachers report much higher classroom time on ECCE.
Rocket Learning News
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Three DRK Portfolio Orgs Receive Google.org AI Prize for the Global GoalsOver the next three years, Jacaranda Health will develop, deploy, and scale a first-of-its-kind generative AI model capable of offering context-sensitive information and referral support…Mar 2024
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Three DRK Portfolio Orgs Receive Google.org AI Prize for the Global GoalsOver the next three years, Jacaranda Health will develop, deploy, and scale a first-of-its-kind generative AI model capable of offering context-sensitive information and referral support…Mar 2024