Humana People to People India

For children from socio-economically marginalized backgrounds, access to quality foundation learning is the first step towards a better and brighter future. In India, the Government runs one of the largest primary school networks in the world aimed at providing free basic education to every child. These schools account for over 70% of enrolments in rural areas. 

However, this success in access has not been accompanied by quality of education. Various challenges like skill deficits in teachers and lack of child-centric resources available to children have resulted in a situation where 3 of 4 children in these schools progress past the primary stage without acquiring the basic learning skills.
HPPI has developed and is implementing the digital-DMM solution in partnership with State Governments in India with an aim to improve the quality of training of primary grade teachers in child-centric pedagogies and innovative teaching methodologies.

Over 60% of children in Government primary schools in India are crossing over the primary stage of education without even acquiring basic literacy and numeracy levels. Considering that India has one of the largest networks of Government supported primary schools (1+ million schools), it can be roughly estimated that over 60 million children suffer the long-term consequences of low quality of education in the public schooling system.

A key reason for this persisting situation is that teachers in the Government schools use out-dated rote method of teaching and have skill deficits when it comes to child-centric methods of teaching. This prevents children from socio-economically marginalized backgrounds from gaining quality learning.  
Additional factors compound this problem- India’s socio-cultural and linguistic diversity; predominantly rural population (which requires a large number of schools to be set up on rural and remote areas) and the high costs of designing and deploying innovative teaching learning resources. 
A complementing factor to all the above is the fact that education is a state subject in India- which means that geographical replication requires the cycle of systemic integration and replication to be repeated in each of India’s 28 States, a time consuming process. 

HPPI’s solution to the problem is called digital DMM- a fully integrated set of resources for teachers and children.

Digital DMM builds on HPPI’s “People to People Pedagogy”. Humana People to People India’s education initiatives sees the teacher and the student as co-creators of knowledge and skills, where the student as much as possible takes the driver’s seat in the process of learning. The learning process involves acquisition of information and knowledge, processing that into understanding and to action for positive change.
This permeates all educational programmes developed by Humana People to People India, with the objective to empower the learners with knowledge, skills and the capacity to engage in a world of life-long learning.
Building upon more than a decade of grassroot experience, HPPI has indigenously developed a full set of child-centric pedagogical models, tools and resources that span from pre-primary education to primary education to post-primary stage as well as teacher education. 
Going ahead, HPPI aims to complement the direct implementation and support approach with a digital platform that will enable teachers in government primary schools to access high quality resources free of cost that will enable them to transfer the quality education to their students. 

Digital DMM is aimed at impacting teachers and children in government primary schools. 

This principal focus is intended to maintain the emphasis on India’s Right to Education law which mandates free education for all children of the ages of 6-14 years. 

Specifically, HPPI’s approach is focussed on the following categories of beneficiaries:

A. PRE-SERVICE STUDENTS
Digital DMM was primarily designed for use in pre-service training of teachers in DIETs (District Institutes of Education and Training, district level training and support institutions set up and managed by the States). By focusing on a high-investment area (DIETs are well equipped and states invest resources for 2-year training to each new teacher), HPPI’s aim was to maximize the benefits accruing to the young teachers. 

B. EXISTING SCHOOL TEACHERS
Digital DMM is also useful for in-service teachers, since it integrates a wide variety of themes and topics of interest to teachers. Additionally, HPPI is in the process of integrating specialized resources that are designed for the classroom environment- called Kadam. This resource will help teachers cope with multi-level classrooms in a child-centric manner. 
By transitioning the teaching process from a rote methodology to a child-driven approach where the teachers acts as a facilitator, and children peddle their own path.
By reducing the technical burden on teachers in this way, the model aims to increase adoption and effectiveness in the classroom. Additionally, the inbuilt learning level outcome measurement tools enable the teacher to judge the learning progress of the child in an objective manner.

C. IN-SCHOOL CHILDREN IN GOVERNMENT PRIMARY SCHOOLS
Reputed surveys like ASER highlight the persistent learning gaps of children in government primary schools. 
HPPI’s educational resources are designed to increase child-driven processes in learning, thereby helping children peddle their own path. This approach is expected to enhance lifelong learning and progress in further education that is required for a better future for these children.

D. OUT-OF-SCHOOL CHILDREN
Additionally, even though India has a high enrolment ratio, the size of the population means that the out-of-school children are large in number. HPPI’s children centric approach, where children drive their own learning progress and peddle their own path, is estimated to have high impact on out of school children- who often have multi-year learning deficits which hinders their ability to catch up in class.

E. PARENTS AND COMMUNITY
Parents and community play a key role in the development of children in any location. HPPI’s project models reinforce interactions between teachers, parents and the community to foster greater engagement and meeting to identify and solve issues.
This approach is estimated to result in greater sustainability at the local level.

Learning process in schools is driven by teacher and student. By focusing on the needs and capacity of both, digital DMM project aims to address the crucial bottlenecks in formation of better classrooms.

Digital DMM resources are designed for holistic development of the student with a wide resource set of activities and themes that are useful for teachers.
Additionally, by including a transparent and objective learning assessment system, both teacher and student benefit and a truly child-centric approach is made possible in the classroom- as a teacher is aware of where each child stands and where he needs to be.

HPPI is selecting the “Scale” stage of development for digital DMM as this is most appropriate. 

Specifically, 
Digital DMM is now a proven concept- of using programme-based methodologies and child centric learning pedagogies.
Digital DMM has been fully developed and is a working model. 
Digital DMM has been successfully piloted in multiple States with evidenced outcomes.
HPPI has partnerships with 7 States in India that provide the foundation for large scale implementation and impact.

Digital DMM is innovative in its approach in bringing together different components of teaching and learning in a manner so as to provide for the holistic development of the student-teacher. Conceptually, digital DMM closely follows the curriculum of the 2-year Diploma in Education qualification that is mandated for new primary school teachers in India. 

By bringing together the concepts of periods, studies, courses and experiences, digital DMM introduces a holistic learning and training environment for the teachers. These innovative components ate outlined below:
PERIODS: A period is a period of 1 month to which an over-arching theme is linked. The activities in each period are linked to the theme to inculcate thematic awareness in the teachers. Each of the 22 periods is selected from topics of current interest for teachers, including community issues, health, global warming, women’s rights, and so on. 
STUDIES: This is the self-guided learning aspect where the student himself navigates through the learning process using the elaborate digital DMM structure which has been carefully designed to give optimal transparency and progress visibility.
COURSES: Self-navigated study by the student is complemented by guided lectures by the teachers, which builds up topical knowledge and learning.
EXPERIENCES: Activity based learning completes the learning aspects by enabling the student to learn through different activities he undertakes.
The entire programme content is supplemented by a digital library. 
Programme design is done through a structured manner- dividing and grouping content in modular fashion into DMM Fields, DMM Units and DMM Points.

Current outreach is as under:

States: 5 (Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh)
No. of Active Students: 21,694
No. of Pre-service student teachers: 3,513
No. of schoolteachers reached: 3,848

Planned outreach data is provided in the following section in more detail.

As per the Capacity Statement for Education, HPPI’s vision for its Education is “That all children have access to education and the acquisition of skills for life-long learning enabling every child in India access to opportunities and with the will and capacity to contribute to the development of their community and the nation.”

With this foundation, HPPI has designed its scalable interventions to be implemented in collaboration so that the impact on learning is integrated through the system.

With this background, key indicators that HPPI proposes to use to measure the impact of its projects in education are:
- No. of children (out-of-school and in-school) reached by its projects
- No. of children with improved learning levels
- No. of teachers reached through its projects
- No. of teachers involved with the projects
- No of States with partnerships
- No. of States where DIETs (District Institutes of Education/ Training) are supported
- No. of ed-tech labs set up

Additionally to these quantitative indicators, HPPI also proposes to evaluate systemic impact by assessing the involvement and engagement of Education Departments and their officials in the projects and in adoption of child-centric learning methodologies.

Data as on May 31, 2021:

Total Employees: 3,786
Full Time Employees: 1,355
Part Time Employees: 2,431
Contractors, etc.: 10

Over the years, HPPI has steadily built up its programme design and development resources in primary education. A core focus is the in-house design of content, pedagogy and programme frameworks. HPPI now has a full-time team Education Programme Professionals who have been further provided exposure and training by HPPI in programme-based education systems. The in-house team enables HPPI to develop content that is relevant, tightly integrated, thoroughly verified and which can be seamlessly aligned with the State curriculum for teacher training, mainstreaming and basic education. Over the last 8 years, the team has produced nearly 2,000 knowledge modules for the NeTT primary teacher training programme in English and Hindi and the comprehensive Kadam learning cum assessment framework which covers over 500 learning competencies from Grade 1-5 as per the national curriculum.

Programme implementation and quality control is assured by a dedicated Education Society of Schools, which is led by a full-time Director. The team works on undertaking surveys, hiring and training staff, monitoring and managing the implementation quality and streamlining local processes.

Partnerships are maintained by HPPI’s Partnership teams, consisting of professionals with extensive experience working constantly to develop and nurture institutional partnerships necessary to pilot and scale development interventions in line with HPPI’s long term objective.

At the top is the Board of Directors which leads the development of long-term objectives and strategies, as well as taking decisions on key issues. The Board is a combination of independent and full-time directors to ensure optimal inputs of skill and objectivity.

HPPI’s Board of Directors focuses on diversity and gender inclusion for broad representation of social values and focus in its direction and operations. The Board is led by the Chairperson, a lady who brings in vast experience in diverse fields in both the private and government domains.

Additionally, the remaining 4 directors are all full-time directors and are long term employees of HPPI with extensive experience in project implementation in the 5 development verticals (Education & Literacy, Livelihood and Community Development, Health, Environment and Microfinance). 
A brief of what each member of HPPI’s Board brings in is outlined below:

Chairperson: Dr. (Mrs) Akula Padmavathi- over 30 years of professional experience in social skill development, with a Doctorate in International Economics (USA), a PhD in Forensic Science and a degree in Law, she has been a Founding Member and Chairperson of HPPI since the year 2000.

Mr.Sanjeev Bhatt: Over 25 years of experience, he has been serving as a Director on the Board since the year 2001. He has an M.Sc. in Botany and leads the Grant Administration department of HPPI. He has been commemorated with the Indian Achievers Award for Social Service.

Mr.Kailash Khandelwal: With over 26 years of experience in the development sector, Mr. Khandelwal joined the Board of Directors in 2012. He has a Bachelor of Arts and leads initiatives in Livelihood and Community Development.

Mr. Manoj Singh and Mr. Ved Prakash Yadav- both are postgraduates in social work and carry past experience in HPPI’s development work.

Scaling up of an advanced ed-tech platform like digital-DMM requires a level of coordination, planning, resource mobilization and partnerships that require concerted multilateral engagement.

A major challenge in multilateral collaboration is timing, with different organizations coming on board and exiting the intervention at different times, thereby causing an inefficient product development lifecycle.

Support from MIT Solve will help HPPI access different contributors (donors, technical experts and marketing experts) which would help greatly in accelerating and optimizing the product development cycle of digital-DMM to achieve optimal impact at the targeted population.

Area that HPPI feel need support are outlined below:

A. HUMAN CAPITAL
HPPI is seeking collaboration in sourcing and developing resources in technical areas such on ed-tech platforms, impact assessment, etc. Better capacity in these areas will enable HPPI to develop and evidence better products at a faster pace.

B. BUSINESS MODEL
Scaling of ed-tech interventions like digital-DMM requires offtake by both institutions and individuals. While HPPI has extensive experience in partnership with the Government, it welcomes collaboration in areas of scaling strategies, market assessment, differential pricing, etc. It is expected that efforts in these areas will enable HPPI to better design its products to market needs and explore revenue based approaches to non-BoP (Base of Pyramid) populations that can reduce load on grant funding.

C. FINANCIAL SUPPORT
Adapting to the new environment of hybrid financing and results based financing are areas where HPPI is exploring technical partnerships to make partnership pitches to donors/ investors in new modes of funding.

D. PUBLIC RELATIONS
Since development interventions are extensively customized, development and promotion of the product brand is key to customer offtake. 
HPPI welcomes partnership/ collaboration with agencies which can help with in-kind contribution in this area.

E. TECHNOLOGY
HPPI is seeking in-kind contribution to development of online platforms/ digital delivery systems that will enable access to digital-DMM in a wide variety of avenues (mobile, computers, cloud, offline, etc.) with access to updated resources in low-bandwidth environments.

Currently, HPPI is working in technical partnership with the Humana Federation and in Operational Partnership with different State Governments in India.

HPPI welcomes collaboration and partnership with specialized and technical organizations who have experience in advanced training frameworks like Digital-DMM.

In order to improve coordination with State Governments in India and in line with its approach of providing all educational designs free-of-cost to State Governments, HPPI has extensively focussed on development of in-house capacity. However, challenges such as cost of development and technical complexity have limited the pace of progress in advanced solutions like digital-DMM.

Collaboration and partnership with suitable MIT Solve network partners will help HPPI push forward the pace of development of digital-DMM and associated products in a manner that will enable HPPI to provide quality educational designs free-of-cost to States, thereby economizing the cost of delivery to children from socio-economically marginalized backgrounds.