CAPE

Gunjali Singh has over 10 years of experience volunteering with and leading initiatives for non-profits in India , New York, Singapore and Hong Kong. Most recently, she has been working on programs in education, women empowerment and capacity building of youth. She is currently the Associate Director for Fundraising and Communications for 321 Education Foundation. She has a Bachelors in Commerce and an MBA in Marketing and started her career in the corporate sector at GE Capital. 

COVID related closure of schools in India has put an additional hurdle in the learning of children especially those from marginalised backgrounds . Our conversations with stakeholders revealed that the top challenge teachers and school leaders were facing was to find a low-cost, simple way to engage children in online learning. Teachers were spending hours trying to put together lessons from the resources available online. Another issue was that many of their students came from households with one device for all members of the family and also had data constraints. They could not access a phone for a long time in the day and were not able to download or watch high data consuming videos. We built CAPE with free lesson plans aligned to the curriculum  to resolve this crying need. All lessons can be sent on Whatsapp and it takes teachers less than 10 minutes to get set up.

The problem we are trying to solve is the access to learning  during closures for children who have device and data constraints. We also aim to empower teachers to be able to help their students during lockdown by checking in on them and customising communication to suit their needs. Our intervention frees valuable time that they don't have to spend creating lessons by curating resources online and they can now use this capacity to best support their students' learning. The whole world is affected by this problem - especially children from marginalised background in India. There are over 260 million children in India. In usual times there are many hurdles in their learning. COVID has added the additional hurdle of online learning to the mix. With no foreseeable end to this situation, there has to be a way that children continue to learn from their homes and within their constraints. 

CAPE is a FREE online lesson bank where educators can find complete lessons that can be easily sent on WhatsApp. These lessons are aligned to their respective boards (CBSE/ Maharashtra/ Telangana/ Karnataka state board curriculums) and there is no sign-up/ login required. Since its launch 3 weeks ago,  over 10,000 teachers from all over India have used these lessons to teach approximately 200,000 children. Our user insights reveal that it takes teaches less than 10 minutes to get set up to use CAPE. This is because they are familiar with WhatsApp and do not have to learn how to use a new technology or download an app that takes space on their phones. Students, whose families have one device for the whole household and so they cannot have one child spending a lot of time using data to look at videos. Lessons are easy to understand for students and free to use for the teachers and school leaders. 

We serve the school leaders, teachers, parents and students studying in affordable private schools (APS’s) in India ( Between $15-$30 in school fee per month). Having worked closely with first generation learners for the past few years, they reached out to us when the pandemic started and schools were shut down. Through extensive interviews, we realised that the access to learning is even more limited to students and teachers of these schools because of the constraints they experience everyday - limited devices, limited data, lack of availability of curated resources as well as the overwhelming sense of insecurity that the pandemic brought to these families. CAPE is freely available on the internet and so can be used by anyone in India or globally. 

In this new COVID world, online learning has become a norm. Schools and students with resources like devices, high speed internet will be able to create learning environments at home. The communities we serve do not access to these resources. They face considerable challenges in their learning in the normal world, the COVID world has complicated their access even more. As such, if we do not tailor make online learning solutions for them like CAPE, they will be left behind.

By Mid-march, The Govt. of India announced a complete lockdown on schools. Our partner schools, already financially precarious, were not equipped for a situation like this and turned to us. We heard them and understood their needs - parents were finding it difficult to engage their children, school leaders wanted to reach out to the parents in a simple low-cost way, teachers wanted to engage children digitally but were finding it difficult to find resources and children were bored - it had been a while since they had been to school and they had additional device and data constraints at home. 

In our organisation, we created teams of 3-4 people working hard to crack problems like what is the best way we can curate content for the teachers, how can we best distribute it, how can we track it.

We experimented with a few formats before deciding upon the name CAPE, to serve the superhero that is our teachers for FREE with curated lessons and assessments to be distributed via Whatsapp - an app used by 250 million users in India. It has already reached 300+ cities in India, over 400 schools/organizations and parents and over 10000 teachers. 

The mission of our organisation has been to magnify the spirit of every child through magnifying the spirit of every educator and every school. In the past 9 years of our existence, we have served low-income communities in 3 cities in India reaching and impacting thousands of teachers and students. 

Through our programs, we have trained and coached teachers, supported and consulted with school owners and leaders, and in the past year, directly impacted the foundational learning of thousands of students in India putting them on a different life trajectory. 

Needless to say, we believe that where you are born shouldn’t determine your life’s outcomes and it is important for every child to receive the best education. The CEO of the organisation was the first Teach for India fellow and has dedicated his life to bringing out the best in teachers and students. 

The CEO of 321 Education Foundation is a pioneer in the education sector in India. Hailing from the first batch of Teach for India, he became a Fisher fellow with KIPP schools in the USA. After learning best international practices in countries like Finland, China and UK, he opened the first 321 school in Mumbai, India. He was awarded the Ashoka fellowship and Echoing Green fellowship in 2013.

321 Education Foundation has a strong 50 member team hailing from diverse experiences in education in India - they have been former Teach for India fellows, coaches, school leaders, program designers and monitoring and evaluation experts that are passionate about making a difference in the lives of students in India. The organization started with a school in a slum in Mumbai, India that gained repute. Slowly, they started a with small cohort of teachers who were interested in learning about the pedagogical practices of the school. This became a full fledged teacher training program over 2014-2019. In 2018, a pilot program specifically designed to build foundational literacy and numeracy skills made massive strides doubling students mastering these skills. In 2019, the program scaled to 8000 students with equally impressive results. Having a strong team, culture and presence in the education sector places us in a strong and unique position to solve the education access problem especially during the COVID crisis.

In the early days of developing CAPE, we had developed a system that involved us making broadcast lists and sending messages to access the lesson plans to those enrolled in CAPE. After it's tremendous reception, we struggled to keep up with this distribution system and had to take the call to change it in the second week. This meant hours of rework from the team. We made sure that their morale was up and that this initial failure did not disappoint them. It also meant that the first 65 schools in the program who had gotten used to the way the distribution worked needed to be reoriented to the new system. We put new registrations on hold for two days while we personally called the school leaders from each one of these schools and took them through the new process. We may have lost the new registrations for those days but we ascertained that it was necessary to onboard existing users before we took in any more users. 

For this I would like to write about our CEO Gaurav Singh. The greatest testament to his leadership is the high level of retention 321 Education Foundation has experienced in the last 8 years since its inception.Some of our team members started their career with 321 and cannot fathom working anywhere else. This is because of the deep care and concern with which he approaches issues and engages his peers. 

He has seen the organization through many challenging times with testy government partnerships and flag-shipped two high impact programmes. 321 had to transition the school we were running to another NGO as it was the best way forward. This was a difficult decision but as a leader Gaurav knew it was in the best interest of the organisation as well as the school. His honesty made the transition easier for the people in the org. 

He delves deep into scenarios to anticipate challenges that the organization might face and plans meticulously to ensure the organisation survives and pivots in the right direction well before it is too late. This has required him to take extremely hard calls but his inclusive and open approach has paved for easier transition. 

CAPE is unique because it ensures learning for children, within their constraints. Most learning solutions want you to download and sign in , something that the marginalised communities we serve who are not tech savvy cannot be burdened with. It uses google and Whatsapp for distribution and existing resources freely available. We dont' try and create whats already out there. We try to bring it to our beneficiaries in a simple and easy format. 

We have seen over 10,000 children and 200,000 children join in the last 4 weeks since launch. This project has exponential reach as governments of different states from India are now reaching out to us. 

We do not know how long COVID will force closures of schools. We want to reach as many educators and children as we can. 

Device availability for our beneficiaries. WE need investment in tech to scale like whatsapp bots. We would like to have resources to create an app and build in tracking mechanisms as well. 

Budget Private Schools

Delhi Government 

To be recognised with the elevate prize will be an honour and a huge boost for our program. We want to expand CAPE and will require funding for it. Will be hard to come by since this is a free service therefore we hope we can use the award funds from Elevate 

Education institutions and foundation across the world for research as well as to advance our programs learning outcomes.