MSDF supports Project Sankalp
Leading organizations such as USAID, J. P. Morgan and Michael & Susan Dell Foundation (MSDF) have provided a total grant of US$4.5 million to India’s Avanti Fellows, the social education enterprise running India’s largest interventions integrating technology to improve Math and Science achievement in secondary schools.
The grants are a testament of Avanti Fellows’ pedagogical interventions in bringing equitable access to premier institutions for students of low-income families, said Avanti Fellows, adding that the grant will help realize its vision of creating a self-resilient Education Ecosystem for Bharat
MSDF is supporting Project Sankalp, a system transformation of 160+ schools through the integration of Blended Learning in Haryana to improve the quality of STEM education in government secondary schools.
USAID has awarded funding to evaluate Project Sankalp for over 45,000 students and 900 teachers.
Avanti’s Project Sankalp has been running over the past two years. The project covers 160 intervention schools, where teachers are being provided with technology and content to teach Mathematics and Science in Grade 9-12.
In addition to the product, Avanti monitors progress in every single school closely, through a team of program managers and through the assistance of government officials.
The project is being evaluated by JPAL (Founded by Abhijit Banerjee, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics), said Avanti on 12 Nov 2020.
USAID announced 16 new awards through its Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) to test and scale breakthrough solutions to the world’s most intractable development challenges.
The successful organizations, many of which are new to working with USAID, span six sectors and nine countries and Avanti Fellows is one of the two organizations in India to have received support for its unique pedagogical approach.
J.P. Morgan is backing a 3-year intervention to train 1740 low-income high-school students across 31 Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya (JNV) schools in Karnataka.
Avanti’s JNV Program, supported by J.P. Morgan focusses on embarking students on career paths by preparing for India’s highly competitive college entrance examinations IIT-JEE (Indian Institute of Technology – Joint Entrance Exam) and NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test).
The program will train 78 government school teachers to run a fifteen-hour-a-week after-school program for the students on the school premises.
It also provides a high-touch mentorship and career services program focused on career guidance and securing internships and jobs during and after the Avanti intervention.
Over the last decade, Avanti has evolved to become one of India’s largest and most effective science and math education organizations for engineering and medical test preparation, spanning over 16 states and 4 union territories.
Avanti currently reaches over 1,500 students every year in-classroom programs and over 10,000 through its free online courses. Avanti’s blended learning approach provides an easy-to-scale product, simple to implement the intervention, even in low-resource environments.
Avanti Fellows is an award-winning non-profit organization established by two IIT alumni – Akshay Saxena and Krishna Ramkumar in 2010 with the support of the Pan-IIT alumni organization. #grant #banking #funding #education #technology /fiinews.com
