MIT Solve

Solution overview

Our Solution

Save The Children India, ECCE, Mumbai

Tagline

Creating a robust process to improve the access of children, parents and teachers to closely interconnect to acheive impactful learning

Pitch us on your solution

Early Childhood Education in India is undergoing a marked growth. With increased understanding of how rapidly a young child's brain develops, there is increased focus on providing experiential opportunities and closely working with families and teachers to help enable a supportive environment. Yet, due to the social sector divide within India, children from urban slum communities are left far behind. Having closely worked within these communities for the past 30 years, the solutions we propose are

1. Mechanisms to enhance the child’s ability to think about his/her own thinking.

2. Maintaining a consistent channel of Parent involvement by creating a Parent Resource (which will also serve as a parent education tool)

3. Creating an Open Resource of Early Childhood Education Material made available to Early Childhood Educators/Teachers in their local languages.

Scaled globally, this will yield improved learning by involving the three crucial stakeholders (young child, parent and teacher) closely.

What is the problem you are solving?

In India, 19 % of the total population are children below the age of 14. Within that approximately 7% of the children are in the age group of 3 to 5 years. These figures are based on census data. Within this 7%, almost 60% of the children belong to the marginalized communities. 40% of the children in this age group find themselves in supportive, nurturing environments based on their spending power. The contrast is marked in marginalized communities; children are mostly first generation learners, parents play a rather disconnected role in their education, teachers in these setups are often under qualified, lacking early childhood education understanding themselves. In order to provide equal opportunities to young children we propose

1. Making metacognitive activity processes accessible to the teacher will enable her to directly improve child learning.

2. Creating a parent education tool that will better support child learning

3. Teachers from the disadvantaged background are cutoff from the mainstream access of the resource pool of the sector owing to their low educational qualifications and low incomes. There is an immense need to provide more opportunities to access open resources in their local languages.

Who are you serving?

Our work as an organisation within the early childhood education setup has mainly focused on looking to improve the holistic development of young children in the lower socioeconomic strata of our society. Over 30 years of concentrated work in this sector, has given us a clear understanding of the existing needs, concerns, and challenges that present itself within the population we work with. In young children any advancement in learning or cognitive development is possible only if all points of the triad are suitably strengthened. The three points of this triad being the young child at the apex and the parent and the teacher being the other two points. Technologically building a child's ability to improve his or her own thinking (meta-cognition) needs to be suitably bolstered by strengthening both parent involvement and providing access to early childhood educators with a variety of resource.

What is your solution?

Currently the solution being a conceptual framework.

We have put together the following framework in place.

Select only the most relevant.

Reduce barriers to healthy physical, mental, and emotional development for vulnerable populations
Prepare children for primary school through exploration and early literacy skills

Where is your solution team headquartered?

Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

Our solution's stage of development:

Concept