If there is one thing we have learned from our several decades of experience in the social sector, it is that complex problems require different actors to come together. Attempting to solve problems in isolation, no matter how well intended, rarely works.
This article seeks to unpack our experience and learnings so they can be shared with others who are also committed to the path of long-term social change in India.
Community as the pathway to scale
For civil society organisations (CSOs) like ours that work on societal missions such as universalising education, what we mean by ‘society’ must be defined and models that help bring together all actors who make up this system must be identified.
When Pratham was set up in 1993 with the goal that every child should be in school, the words ‘scaling’ and ‘systems change’ were not widely used. But from the get-go, our founding structure included a combination of people from across the social spectrum: government, businesses, nonprofits, and, most importantly, citizens.
Today, ‘systems change’ is shorthand for working with governments. And while it is true that the government is a big part of the public education system, government schools, in essence, belong to the citizens whose taxes pay for them.
Pratham started its work more than three decades ago with the setting up of balwadis, which were run by people from the community. If the people in a particular locality felt that a preschool was a good idea, they found the space and the people, and we helped them set it up and run it. Once news of this model spread by word of mouth, people started approaching us to help them start balwadis in their localities. The only thing we did was not say ‘no’, and the model took off. Involvement of the community has been key to running our programmes.
More recently, during the pandemic when there were long school closures, families (across all income brackets) stepped up and engaged actively with their children’s education. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that the fall in learning levels was much less than initially anticipated.
It is interesting to look at the underlying demographic shift. Data collected by the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) on parental education shows that parents today have significantly higher levels of schooling compared to 10 years ago. For example, according to all-India rural ASER data, close to half of all mothers with children between the ages of three and eight years had not been to school in 2014. By 2024, this figure had halved and close to 64 percent of all mothers had more than five years of schooling.
This dramatic change is essentially the demographic dividend resulting from the universalisation of elementary education, with parents becoming a valuable resource for children’s education—one that can be catalysed at scale.
Working with government and communities must go hand in hand
Engaging closely with families and working with the government does not have to be an ‘either-or’ situation.
Community participation is as crucial to driving change at the scale that befits our country as getting government officials to create the conditions that take the solutions to as many families as possible. This interplay, in fact, is seen across many states now.
For instance, in Punjab, government schools host activity workshops with parents of preschool children. In Maharashtra, as part of the NIPUN programme, the government has encouraged the formation of neighbourhood (mohalla) mothers’ groups for children of classes 1 to 3, and there are now more than 2,00,000 such groups in the Zilla Parishad schools.
As far as working within the government system is concerned, initiatives such as these are successful when government officers who mentor and support teachers get first-hand experience of the new ways of teaching and come to believe that these can make a difference.
Attempting to solve problems in isolation, no matter how well intended, rarely works.
When working with children who are in class 3 or higher, using our Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) methodology, we have seen that a child typically jumps one learning level, say from word level to paragraph level, every 10 days. The government officials who provide mentoring and academic support, whom we call ‘leaders of practice’, run their own daily practice classes for at least 21 days. Once they experience the children’s development first-hand in their own class, they become the biggest ambassadors and advocates for promoting efforts such as TaRL to improve learning.
The question then shifts from ‘is involvement of government and community essential?’ to ‘how does one create the infrastructure and ecosystem for this?’
When working with a large institutional structure, a CSO’s aim should be to supplement and catalyse improvements in the system, while at the same time mobilising and strengthening community support. Pratham has preferred to do this rather than setting up parallel systems.
When we started in the 1990s, there was a need to strengthen the community presence in education via balwadis but we were aware that the longer-term play was to connect community engagement within the government system.
Given the vast and diverse nature of our country, it is natural that different state governments have their own priorities. For example, for early childhood education, we have seen different departments in different states step up and act in their own way. As long as the end goal of learning is achieved, we have learned to meet state governments on their terms, and simultaneously focus on our work of engaging closely with communities.
Experiment, evaluate, and communicate continuously
As an organisation, we have tried many solutions over time and learned from past waves of work. If someone asks about our theory of change, we will say: Find the problem and start working on the solution, haath pair maarte raho (keep trying, keep plugging away). Once you zero in on a need and narrow down two or three things you can do to fill it, get cracking. You take a few steps forward, a few back, a few up, and a few down, and by and by you get somewhere. If something works and is promising, move forward. If it’s not successful, go back to the drawing board.
We work both directly with communities and with government at different levels. Our direct work in 8,000–10,000 villages serves as a laboratory for trying out new ideas and fine-tuning models to bring to the larger canvas, which happens when we work with governments or work on scale with community volunteers.
It is imperative that organisations continuously evaluate the outcomes they are trying to achieve, and use rigorous data to assess their interventions and test their theory of change.
The process of scaling is always non-linear and messy.
Even before we started conducting ASER, the annual household survey that tracks foundational learning across all rural districts of India, we would use easy tools to collect data and understand what worked. At one level, we conducted simple surveys of children in villages and created village report cards to shine a light on the learning gap. At the other end of the spectrum, we were among the first to use randomised control trials (RCTs) to understand ‘what works’.
However, these tests and evaluations alone are not enough. It is equally important to convert complex data into simple messages that communities and governments can engage with. This helps in aligning everyone to the same goal and getting them to work together towards the same cause.
Universal enrolment is a great example of this. We were able to achieve it as a country because everyone—parents, teachers, policymakers—understood the need and the direction in which we all had to move.
Foundational literacy and numeracy is now the next big bet. To achieve this at scale, we will again need clear and relevant messaging and active participation from the government, community, and CSOs. And we need long-term and patient capital and interested funders to support this movement.
Recognise that scaling is messy
The word ‘scaling’ seems to suggest linear change, or something that keeps growing bigger. But the process of scaling is always non-linear and messy. Even within the government, programmes rise, die down, and restart depending on the officials present, contexts involved, and funding available. Projects go back and forth and take a life of their own. This is a marathon and not a sprint.
Resources may become scarce; governments may turn indifferent; or circumstances may become unfavourable. Such times do come. To overcome these, we work with district officials, in addition to state leaders, so that they can carry our ideas to other districts within the state when they get transferred.
In other words, we must recognise that long-term social change is inherently tied to uncertainty, and that calls for a sense of persistence and resilience that all of us as funders and CSOs need to build.
This needs a different funding mindset
Operating in the manner that we have outlined above requires a new and different financial approach. It needs patient philanthropy and multi-year, unrestricted funding.
The Indian diaspora has provided us vital support to do the work we have done over the past several decades, and we now have domestic philanthropists stepping up to support deeper and longer-term work with public systems.
CSR, due to their governance models, may find it a little difficult to fund the multi-year projects that this kind of work needs. However, we have also started seeing some companies come forward to partner with us when we work with state governments and communities.
One of the greatest learnings of our journey has been to understand the essential role of community in driving change, and to embed relevant models of community participation into the government’s work. Lasting change happens when communities, governments, and indeed all actors work together. We have had the privilege of seeing this journey come to fruition and grow stronger with time.
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Know more
- Read about the gaps in participation, writing, and classroom talk that are affecting foundational learning outcomes.
- Learn more about the TaRL programme.
- Read about India’s vanishing primary school.
