Pratham: Rewriting the Outlook for India’s Urban Poor

“Every child in school and learning well” is the goal of Pratham’s vision to see reading, writing and arithmetic taught – along with good living habits for personal hygiene and clean and healthy environments, as well as respect for other people and their beliefs – in mentally stimulating and physically attractive surroundings. Founded in 1994 with funding from UNICEF, it is the largest single non-government organization (NGO) addressing India’s complex education issues.

Since its inception, Pratham has impacted over a million children in urban India, consistently reaching out to more than 200,000 children every year through its various programs. In addition to its urban programmes, Pratham launched Read India in July 2007, a catalytic program to carry their programs forward in rural India.

The Michael & Susan Dell Foundation began its collaboration with Pratham in 2004, giving $310,000 to support primary education programs in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai, and a micro-nutrient supplementation program in Mumbai. Beginning in 2005, subsequent grants totaling more than $1.7 million have focused on promoting reading in vernacular language, innovative English teaching techniques to teach first generation learners, training poor children to successfully compete in state-level scholarship exams, pre-school and library programs to reach destitute children living in the bastis (urban slum pockets) of Mumbai and Delhi.

By 2006, Pratham was working intensively with approximately 20 percent of the slum population of Mumbai. It had successfully targeted 956 bastis communities for improving their literacy profiles and completed a basic literacy skills survey (ASER 2006) to provide a baseline for evaluation. The survey found that overall learning levels in Pratham communities exceeded learning levels in the municipal schools. In 2007, Pratham initiated a collaboration to work with first to fifth standard level children enrolled in practically every municipal school in Mumbai; thus effectively reaching across all of Mumbai’s impoverished areas. 

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