Mamaguru Co-Teaching Network

Mentoring parents of children under 7 with the skills to improve children's literacy, numeracy, and SEL at home.

A lot of socioeconomic and emotional problems in adult life come from maltreatment in the early years. The root problem of this maltreatment is the limited parents' understanding and skills about children's behavior and development.

So, as a solution, we help parents find professionals to mentor them in optimizing their children’s development at home. 

We call our service "co-teaching". In a session, parents will play with their children for 30 minutes, while being observed by a teaching partner. Then in the next 10 minutes, the teaching partner will give feedback, analysis, and improvement plan. This solution will allow true personalization according to children's interests, development, and learning pace. 

Currently, we're developing an AI-integrated observation tool for parents to independently observe their children and help others. 

This solution so far has changed parent's mindsets and improved the relationship between parents and children. If this solution was scaled, to the South East Asia countries, we would have stronger economics, better health, and productivity. Quoting Prof. Heckman (economist & noble recipient), "The best investment is in quality early childhood development from birth to five for disadvantaged children and their families. Investing in early childhood education is a cost-effective strategy for promoting economic growth”—James J. Heckman, December 7, 2012

To improve literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional learning milestones at different learning paces and styles, learning has to be personalized. Who knows a child better than their parents? As the first and foremost teachers, parents are the ones to deliver the learning that's tailored according to children's interests and development. 

The problem is, parents have limited understanding and skills on how to deliver quality learning. As an example, when parents get angry at their child pouring out a jar of milk because they see it as misbehavior. Little did they know that their child's learning about volume, measurement, and other basic numeracy concepts. Instead of prohibiting children to explore, parents could narrate their experience to stimulate children's literacy or maybe integrating simple technology to enhance the STEM concept and cognitive flexibility. 

Out of 27 million children in Indonesia, under 7 years old (data from BPS 2020), only 6.3 million children (data from Kemdikbud 2020) go to school. That means 74% of children are out of school. This number must have increased since the pandemic. Therefore, it is critical to equip parents with the understanding and skill to educate their children at home. 

Some factors that contribute to this problem: 
- Global pandemic - a lot of schools, parents, and infrastructure in Indonesia aren't ready to shift to digital learning. 
- Human Resources - lack of quality in educators in the early years' developments 
- Lack of understanding about the importance of early childhood education.

Currently, we target Indonesian parents with children under 7 years old that are affected by school closures. 

We have been talking to parents over the phone or social media to understand their needs. We also have a follow-up call after 3 months of parents joining Mamaguru. 

Through the conversation with parents, we understand that it is challenging to ask children under 7 to sit down in front of a screen to join a long online class. Parents are clueless on how to develop the learning independently at home. Some parents also mentioned that they need mental support while locked down at home with the family all the time. 

At Mamaguru, we mentor the parents so that the children don't have to stare at the screen all the time and parents can optimize the home learning. We equip parents with knowledge and reports about their children's development. With a one-on-one pairing and mentorship system, parents feel that they have a friend or family who has the expertise in a child's development. Mamaguru also supports parents with our partnership with psychologists. 

The challenge is how we can improve literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional learning milestones at different learning paces and styles. 

The problem of why is this difficult to achieve is because different learning paces and styles need personalized learning. Parents and family are the ones who know a child best so that they can deliver truly personalized learning and set the right foundation for their children. 

The best time to set the right foundation and optimize children's development is during 0-5 years old. In Indonesia, the learning mandate starts after 5 years old, many parents don't start sending their children to school before 4 years old, and there's much more learning loss since the pandemic. 

Therefore, equipping the parents are critical to us. Mamaguru provides a solution by mentoring parents of children under 7 years old to optimize home learning. 

Alfona Kang - CEO & co-founder

There are a few reasons that make Mamaguru as an innovative solution: 

- Targeting parents who are the decision and change-maker in the families

- Double curriculum: child-centred play approach and parent's enrichment

- Data & AI integrated technology (under development): to sharpen our observative method and empower parents to mentor other parents

- Community-based learning. 

We expect to see changes in parent's mindset, parenting style, as well as improved relationships between parents and children. When parents understand the keys of early years development, children would be able to grow healthy physically and mentally, have critical and creative thinking, obtain the skills needed in the 21st century, and have a continuous learning drive. 

In a broader perspective, we expect the changes to impact schools as well. Currently, we still see many pre-K schools are very academic and teacher-centred, even though they understand the importance of play for children. Many of them are afraid to change because parent's demand a more conventional learning approach. Parents themselves demand this because of a lack of understanding. 

In the long run, as Mamaguru is moving from community to community, we also hope to see reduced socio-economic problems and gaps in Indonesia.

Yes. We pre-launched in December 2020 with 16 paying users and currently, we have over 150 active parents all across the country. We started with mentoring parents one-on-one through Zoom and have been continuously developing our program. 

Our core technology:

Observation Tool -- Tool to capture Child's learning including but not limited to milestones achieved, engagement, etc

Recommendation Engine -- Recommend resources that will help the child's learning process or parents

Assistance -- Download reports of the child's performance, Browse recommended resources, Partner offers, one-on-one co-teaching.

Activities

Mentoring parents to optimize home learning

Output

Early years intervention will help parents to have the understanding and ability to optimize children's development at home

Short-term Outcomes

Parents who are able to understand their children's behaviors and know how to handle them, will see: 

- Improved parent-child relationship (Larry Edelman in Resources and Connection)

- Reduced maternal and children's mental health problems (APA.org)

- Reduced child's behavior problems (zerotothree.org)

- Improved children's literacy, numeracy, social emotional milestones (RAND Labor and Population, Parenting in the 21st Century)

Long-term Outcomes

Adaptive generation with 21st century skills contributing to labor market success

Mentally healthy workforce increase productivity and economic growth

(heckmanequation.org)

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Assistance for parents

We measure our progress through 2 lenses: parents and children.

We asses and evaluate children's milestones through our reporting system. The intervention is considered successful when children at the end of the milestone age range, after at least 3 months of joining, checked all developmental indicators. 

As for parents, we measure by the number of positive reviews we receive every month. We're currently in the progress of making a set of evaluation instrument using to further assess parent's progress in three domains: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. 

Both in parents and children, we want to see consistent growth of successful intervention. 

Our goals are as following: 

Short term (end of 2022) 

- Launch a group service and attract at least 1000 families in Indonesia

- Train at least 100 teaching partners

- Increase awareness about the importance of early intervention through social media, by growing our Instagram follower counts to 100K

Mid term (3-5 years)

- Scale our service and group co-teaching to all province in Indonesia

- Help at least 100,000 families throughout the countries

- Train and partner up with at least 5,000 teachers

- Partner up with nutritionists, pediatricians, therapist, and other organizations needed to support children's development holistically. 

- Publish our own research on the  impact of our solution to increasing children's literacy, numeracy, social emotional milestones

Long term (>5 years)

- Scale our service in 5 or more countries including other South East Asian countries (Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam), India and the USA. 

- Attract at least 1 million parents in our network as a user. 

- Becoming the number one platform that parents go to when needing parenting advice and support 

- Publish our own research on the long term impact in children's future whose parents join online intervention program at Mamaguru. 

Our plan to achieve these goals are by moving across communities, empowering parents, partnerships with supportive organizations (research, children's health, etc.), leveraging social media and press. 

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A few challenges we face to expand our solution are: 

- Limited funds to develop our research, program and technology

Our current funds are solely from our bootstrapping revenues. Luckily, as Mamaguru is an online solution, we manage to surpress unnecessary expenses such as big facility building.

- Limited quality talents

Currently we have a partnership with Sinau Teacher Development Center to get our first teachers. However, in the future we need more teacher supply when scaling up. Mamaguru has to partner up with more organizations or government to attract and train more educators and staff.

Mamaguru started during the pandemic as a program in Sanggar Aksara Preschool. The idea came up when we see many children struggled to follow online classes for a few hours, teachers were exhausted as well despite the reduced income. After trying a few forms of learning and talking to parents, we decided to help parents be the teacher at home.

We started in December 2020 with 16 parents. We received positive responses from them and then decided to grow the program out of the preschool. We separated from Sanggar Aksara and formed our entity as PT Mentor Keluarga Indonesia under the name of Mamaguru Co-Teaching Network in February 2021. 

We've been growing our numbers of parent-partners, developing partnerships with brands and organizations, as well as developing our technology. 

Here's our team (total of 38):

3 co-founders

2 full time staff (program & administration)

17 teaching-partners (independent contractors)

8 psychologists/ counseling-partners (partnership with Tiga Generasi)

6 marketing & media team (contractor: Adsara Creative)

1 staff tax & accounting (contractor: Attax)

1 curriculum advisor

Dr. Yuliati Siantajani, M.Pd., our curriculum advisor, was a World Bank consultant for early childhood, one out of two people in the curriculum team in the ministry of education for early childhood. She has been in the industry for 30+ years. 

Endinda Krista, M.S.Ed (candidate), is our Chief Curriculum Officer. She is a social media influencer in early childhood education, a national trainer, currently pursuing a master’s degree in infant, toddler & family development.

Hareesh Kumar, M.Tech., CTO, a data scientist, holding a master’s degree in computer science from IIT Bombay with over 3 years of research experience. 

Alfona Kang, S.Ikom., MBA., Chief Executive Officer, graduated with a US business degree along with her management, business consulting, and brand development experiences. 

Our teaching partners have been carefully selected and trained to meet our qualifications.

Although most people in our team are educators, many of them are also parents who understand the needs of our users. The geographical spread of our team also helps us to understand the different contexts of our parent-partners. Lastly, our teaching partners utilize a Whatsapp group to share co-teaching cases, discuss and share improvement ideas. 

To celebrate Indonesia's independence day this year, Alfona came up with an idea to hold an international virtual conference for parents and educators. She gathered the co-founders and started to conceptualize the theme, speakers, as well as session topics. Then within one day, we contacted 17 domestic and international speakers. Alfona also distributed the tasks from approach brand for sponsorship, marketing plan, registration process, to platform readiness. This conference was also momentum for our new parent's curriculum launch. 

We prepared this conference from ideation to implementation within 1 month. At the evaluation stage, we received many positive responses and requested to hold another event next year. As the impact, Mamaguru has seen a significant increase in the number of active users and social media following.  

Currently, we partner with Sinau Teacher Development Center as our training center that equips our teaching partners before joining Mamaguru. 

We also partner with Tiga Generasi Psychology Clinic that provides us with psychologists and further therapy if needed by parents. 

We apply Octava Social Innovation to challenge ourselves as an EdTech company to keep improving so that our solution will be the true answer to the society in Indonesia. Octava MIT Solve would help us gain more awareness and guidance to scale and help more families. We're hoping to access mentorship, fundings, and support to build our impact measurement practice through this competition. 

Currently, we are still bootstrapping and haven't had enough experience in fundraising, including the legal aspect. We're also planning to expand our operation in other countries, which would need support in network connections.

Entering the Octava and MIT Solve Challenge would also drive our public image and branding as a company.