Edu-Philanthropy for India

Posted: December 23rd, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | No Comments »

The remarkable Ashish Diwan writes:

On our journey toward achieving school education reform, our investments act as proof points to achieve larger policy goals. I am excited to highlight some ventures we have catalysed this year.

Saajha is an initiative we incubated within Pratham Delhi, to build and strengthen the capacity of School Management Committees (SMCs) in 60 municipal schools across North and East Delhi. The project aims to demonstrate that meaningful and sustained engagement of the community can improve student attendance and parent participation in the learning process, and positively impact student achievement in the long run.

In our journey with the founders of Saajha, we visited over 30 organisations that are doing innovative work on SMCs, and realized that the ecosystem could benefit from the consolidation of our learnings. Therefore we convened a seminar that brought together 25 organisations across 11 states to highlight effective models for empowering SMCs.

Earlier this year, we launched the India School Leadership Institute (ISLI), which is demonstrating a quality model of training in school leadership, and is now accepting applications to take in its second cohort of school leaders. ISLI plans to launch a city fellowship for leaders of private affordable schools in Delhi in May 2014. It has also found policy relevance by participating in a national consultative group to design the National College on School Leadership (NCSL) that is being rolled out in eight states over the next two years.

Our initiatives with 3.2.1. Schools and The Akanksha Foundation led us to thinking about the opportunity to bring private innovation into the government school system to improve overall quality of education. A strategy and landscape study by McKinsey & Co showed that there is wide interest across state governments in Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) in education. We are now working with other institutions to launch a coalition for Public Private Partnerships in Education (PPPE), which will take the lead in enabling these partnerships across the country.

These are just a few of the initiatives we have worked on this year…

You can visit the Central Square Foundation website here.