Catalyzing ECE at Scale (Rocket Learning)

About the project

This project is one of the 2023 WISE Awards winners.

Context and Issue

Over 85% of brain development occurs before the age of eight when low-income Indian children have almost no cognitive stimulation through institutions or at home. They are already falling behind their higher-income peers - 43% can’t recognize alphabets, and 35% can’t recognize numbers 1-9 in grade 1.

Solution and Approach

Rocket Learning builds early childhood and foundational learning at scale by connecting the government system, teachers/ anganwadi workers and parents, and driving community change by systemically leveraging technology, media, and social incentives. Through our solution, we empower teachers/ anganwadi workers and parents as agents of change to deliver high-quality learning to 1 million children across 70,000 classrooms in 7 Indian states through its innovative, low-cost digital model that sends contextualized content in the local language via our “bot” over Whatsapp groups that function as vibrant digital communities. We then invite teachers/ anganwadi workers and parents to send us back their responses so that we can build continuous motivation through personalized real-time Nudges.

Impact and Future Development

Our solution has demonstrated strong learning gains (RL children are in the top 30% of their cohort), and is inherently cost-effective and scalable - our variable costs are 50c/child/year. Rocket Learning is committed to serving 5 million children and families in the next 3 years, and to create models that can transform early learning across the global south.

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