Eureka Child: Making education a reality for All children

The 2007 national survey on education, which AID India participated in, has shown that 50% of the children in fifth standard in the schools in India are unable to read simple stories or do simple division problems!

Association for India¡¯s Development (AID) is one of few organizations who have decided to tackle this challenge head on. Our core belief is that every child has a right to good education and to the joy of learning. True education should strive to inculcate the spirit of discovery (Eureka moments!) in every child. Only when education is engaging and fun, will children look forward to school and realize their potential. This is the only way to ensure that the current generation is the last one with a literacy rate below 50%!

Since 1997, AID India though Eureka Child, its key initiative, has focused on creating innovative and lasting interventions in the area of education. Over these years, AID India has developed many innovative techniques of teaching basic science, math and reading to children. The techniques have been in the form of subject based learning modules, garnered through extensive work with school children and field experimentation. In 2006, the Government of Tamil Nadu requested AID to train its teacher¡¯s to improve the quality of education. Within a period of 6 months, AID reached out to 7300 schools in 5 districts in Tamil Nadu and trained the teachers on a novel approach to learning. The response from the children and the teachers was amazing. As the chart here shows, AID reached out to 450,000 children in that period and was able to achieve an improvement in reading skills by 30%, i.e., 150,000 new children who could now read. That means we have 150,000 more children now with greater self confidence to face the challenges posed by this world.

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Having demonstrated success in 5 districts and 7300 schools, we now dare to ask the question, why shouldn¡¯t we take this to ALL the 10 million children in Tamil Nadu and for that matter to the 100+ million children across India? The fact that we able to achieve dramatic success in short 6-month span shows that children have the potential to learn, it is just that they haven¡¯t been allowed to! And, that we have figured out how to make them flower on a large scale! The immediate question is can we take this initiative to 30 districts and 10 million children in TN? Yes we can! We do have the ability and the potential to do it. We plan to ramp up this program over the period of 3 years, demonstrating sustained success in 10 districts and then ramping up to 30 districts by leveraging on government support. The only thing that constrains us is finances. How much does it cost? Actually, since we use the government infrastructure for the most part, it costs less than $1 per child per year! About $150 per school! However, since we are targeting 10 districts in the first year, we are looking at 7000 schools with about 1 million children. The total program budget for the 1st year is $1,050,000. In the 2nd and 3rd year, we plan to completely cover all the 13,000 schools in these 10 districts with an anticipated budget of $2 M.