Teach a Kid Make Individual Life (TAKMIL)

Our Vision:

Ensure every child has access to quality education.

Our Mission:

Our mission is to educate children in rural and remote communities without access to school through technology-driven learning solutions.

Teach a Kid Make Individual Life (TAKMIL) is a registered non-profit in the USA, Canada, and Pakistan. In 2017, TAKMIL started its journey from Louisville, USA, to educate out-of-school children located in rural and remote communities. Since 2017, the organization has transformed the lives of over 3000 children in rural communities with quality education by establishing 93 non-formal community-centred schools.

TAKMIL's model is designed for multi-age children who have never been to school in life. These children reside in rural, remote, war-affected, disaster-affected, and far-flung communities with no school. The accelerated and technology-driven model is tailored for these children to empower them with primary and elementary literacy complimented with livelihood skills and ultimately bridging them to higher education pathways. 

Zainab Khan is the Co-Founder and Program Manager of Teach a Kid Make Individual Life. She has been affiliated with TAKMIL for the past six years and worked in Pakistan during the pilot phase of the program. Currently, Zainab is based in Calgary, Canada and is responsible for North America's fundraising, donors and partner relationships. She is also fulfilling her responsibility as Program Manager and leading the operational team of Pakistan. 

In the past six years, Zainab has represented TAKMIL globally on forums such as World Youth Bank Summit (2019), World Innovation Summit for Education, and International Telecommunication Union (ITU). 

Zainab Khan as a team lead is well positioned to effectively support Leap Project based on her role, experience and future aspirations for the project to be scaled globally. She started her journey in the development sector based on her personal experiences of working with refugees and street kids while she was a university student. In 2018, she joined TAKMIL in the pilot stage as a volunteer and committed herself to the mission of education. She led the organization in Pakistan from nine schools to 24 schools, established a team of 102 members, and closely worked with leadership to establish eight chapters in North America. 

Zainab Khan is currently pursuing her doctorate in Neuroscience at Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HIB) at the University of Calgary and her research focuses on the impacts of anaesthetics on children's neurodevelopment, learning, and memory. Zainab also has extensive experience in project management and led a women's shelter project in Calgary by working on funds development, stakeholder engagement, partnership and outreach. She designed, proposed and managed up to 6 projects valuing $ 0.5 Million Canadian Dollars focusing on family violence, healthy parenting, mental health, and immigrant supports. She also provides consultation to other non-profits in digital marketing and project development. In 2023, she was also awarded "Women of Distinction" on International Women's Day by the Government of Alberta. 

Zainab works closely with Dr Shahid Qamar (Founder, TAKMIL) in strategy, planning, and scale up of the organization. Dr Shahid Qamar is a community activist and data scientist who started TAKMIl from his community in Louisville. Zainab is also supported by 5 core senior management team members in Pakistan who are leading school operations, quality assurance, technology implementation, and evaluations. As TAKMIL is in the scale-up and growth phase, the LEAP project would be a priority for the team in order to refine the growth strategy by integrating professional input from educationists, researchers, and other stakeholders. Therefore, we are fully confident to commit 2-4 hrs/ week or additional time for the 12-week LEAP Project sprint. 

TAKMIL educates multiage out-of-children through innovative "school in a box" in communities with no access to school, internet or electricity. 

Recent reports by UNESCO and UIS published in September 2022 estimates that 244 million children and youth between the age of 6 and 18 years worldwide were out of school in 2021. The same report ranks Pakistan second in the list of countries with the largest out-of-school children population. The Missing Third published by Pak Alliance for Maths and Science reports that over 20 million (32%) children in the country are out-of-school. It must be considered that this data does not include over a million children and 30,000 schools impacted by the devastating flood in August 2022 in Pakistan. It is important to highlight that 15.4 million (77%) of these children are based in rural regions of the country. Multiple barriers contribute to these alarming statistics including no access to schools in remote areas. The majority of these remote areas have no electricity or internet rendering it more challenging to make education accessible in these regions. 

TAKMIL is dedicated to providing free quality education to out-of-school children in rural and remote communities with no school, electricity, or internet. The organization specifically focuses on multiage children 95-16 years) who have never been to school in life and empowers them with basic, primary, and elementary education through technology-driven and community-centered non-formal learning solutions. 

TAKMIL offers a portable school in a box for children with no schooling for socially and economically neglected and underprivileged communities This innovative solution has been designed, customized, tailored, and implemented for multi-age (5-15 years), out-of-school children living in resource-limited communities. The solution integrates all elements of accelerated learning, education technology, digital learning, and assessments coupled with progress tracking and evaluation powered by Artificial Intelligence and Big data. This school in a box is managed by a local community member trained to facilitate the learning environment. Every community adopts the solution as per their needs giving an opportunity to children engaged in labour or house chores to study for 3-4 hours daily in the morning or evening as per their convenience. The child is engaged in a transformative journey to start from basic literacy progressively to higher levels of learning in a shorter time. The children learn in the student-centric environment to develop literacy, numeracy, social awareness, digital skills, and personality development. The progress of every child is tracked on a centralized dashboard analyzing the factors in learning and providing in-depth analytics on child progress, class, schools, and network of schools to improve education access, quality, transparency, and accountability

TAKMIL has implemented the following frameworks and practices to evaluate the effectiveness of our solution:

1. Formative Research:

We conduct evaluations on multiple levels:

a. Base Assessments:

All children enrolled in our non-formal schools are evaluated on a base learning and literacy skills assessment. This assessment sets a reference for progressive learning milestones while the child is enrolled in the program. This extensive evaluation focuses on basic literacy (reading, writing, sentence) skills in English, Urdu, and mother tongue, numeracy skills, and social/emotional skills. As the student progresses in the literacy program, a comparative assessment is made with the base assessment. 

b. User Interviews:

We have conducted extensive user interviews with community members and students to evaluate the impact of the program. These life-changing stories have inspired us to strengthen our program and improve its effectiveness.

c. External Evaluations:

Our students have been evaluated externally by provincial literacy departments of non-formal learning and certified for primary education. These certifications have allowed children to mainstream into formal education. Currently, 300 children who graduated from TAKMIL non-formal schools are getting higher education in formal schools validating the effectiveness of our model.  

d. Curriculum Evaluation & Feedback

We have conducted surveys and focus groups with the teachers to identify the strengths and areas of improvement for our accelerated and hybrid curriculum. 

TAKMIL has implemented the following frameworks and practices to evaluate the effectiveness of our solution:

1. Formative Research:

We conduct evaluations on multiple levels:

a. Base Assessments:

We have base assessment data of 3000 children from over 90+ community schools of TAKMIL. This data helped us to plan the learning journey for the children, curriculum pacing and reinforcement strategies. 

b. User Interviews:

User interviews have helped us highlight the success stories of the program. These user interviews have also helped us in identifying the areas of improvement and building additional pathways to empowering our students. 

c. External Evaluations:

External evaluations have validated the effectiveness of our model and also define a road map for curriculum approval by the provincial and federal stakeholders. 

d. Curriculum Evaluation & Feedback

The reports from the extensive evaluations have given us a clear direction to revise our curriculum and improve content, assessments, and training. We are in the process of designing the revised version of our curriculum with a key stakeholder. The curriculum will be launched in the summer of 2023 followed by a national advocacy campaign to share the effectiveness of the unique and innovative curriculum with non-profits and sector partners. 

In 2023, TAKMIL has a proof of concept based on a journey of six years that has empowered 3000 children in over 90 communities in Pakistan. Currently, we are in the process of scaling up our solution to 10,000 out-of-school children by the end of the year and 1 million children in the next 5 years.

We are fully confident that our model is reproducible, scaleable, and replicable to address a major problem of out-of-school children in Pakistan and worldwide. We are currently bringing new members with multiple expertise into our team to establish a fully prepared launching pad for the scale-up phase. We believe this is the optimum time to engage in a LEAP Project and incorporate the valuable experiences of professionals and build our capacity as a team to fulfil our strategic goals.  

Q1. What are the necessary components of the evaluation framework that needs to be incorporated for building research-based evidence for our solution?

Q2. Understand the current strengths and areas of improvement for our education model, curriculum, assessments, monitoring, and technology.

Q3. Learn from professionals to design and develop a scale-up model to generate impact at large. 

Formative Research Outputs:

a. Design a framework for multi-measure research for the effectiveness of the model.

b. Implementation guidelines for the multi-measure research for the team.

c. Build capacity for the successful implementation of the multi-measure research 

Summative research Ourputs:

a.  Design a framework for correlational studies.

b. Implementation guidelines for the correlational studies.

c. Guidelines on publishing the studies to share the learnings for other stakeholders working for out-of-school children globally.  

We will train a team member to pilot multi-measure research and correlational studies for the organization followed by developing an extensive plan for the implementation of the research. The findings of the research will be compiled in the form of a report and shared with stakeholders (team, funder, donors, and partners) through sessions. The report will be used as a foundation for an improvement plan and strategy development to conduct follow-up research and compare the results. Our goal is to have a well-defined and research-based framework in place to evaluate our model's effectiveness and improve it.  

Short-Term Outcomes:

a. Engage with professionals and researchers to refine our solution's scale-up plan.

b. Learn from professionals and researchers to improve our model's effectiveness

c. Develop research frameworks for evaluation of the model's effectiveness

Long-Term Outcomes:

We believe that LEAP Project would be a great opportunity to strengthen research evidence of our model and transform education solutions for out-of-school children worldwide. As we are in the growth phase and are determined to reach 1 million children in the next five years, we hope to incorporate the learnings from LEAP Project in our future roadmap.