ThinkZone
From ThinkZone India
ThinkZone is a social enterprise in India that works towards improving the learning outcomes of children in low-resource settings.
ThinkZone utilizes offline-enabled mobile application solutions for training and equipping youth to become educators. Through ThinkZone’s data-driven technology and research-based methodology on learning, youth support children aged 3-10 years in their communities to develop foundational literacy and numeracy skills.
They also use voice, SMS-based & Whatsapp-based low-cost technology to provide free, interactive learning resources for families, working with communities to support at-home learning for children aged 3-10 years.
Providing quality education to children from under-resourced communities is a huge challenge across India. Imagine being asked to read and being tested without ever getting the chance to learn the alphabet; or having to solve mathematical equations, without knowing numbers. That is the struggle of 50 million children in India who are in primary grades and have yet to attain basic mastery of literacy and numeracy.
These deficits mean students cannot learn from books or other written learning materials, creating a self-perpetuating cycle where the weakest students struggle to catch up and often fall even further behind. As a result, many children leave primary school with such low literacy and math skills that further education, formal employment, and even civic participation are all but impossible.
Education is critical for setting young people up for employment. Unfortunately, most young people from India come from humble educational backgrounds. They also lack the relevant skills and have limited access to innovative platforms, technologies or entrepreneurial approaches to earn livelihoods.
What has been the Impact of ThinkZone?
They started operations in 2015 implementing its education programs across schools, government-run childcare centres and community centres spread across 500+ villages in 4 districts of Odisha. This initial roll-out involved some 4600 children and 250 educators. From their 2019-2020 impact report based on this roll-out, they report:
There is promising evidence that ThinkZone programs can significantly contribute to developing children’s foundational skills:
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71% improvement in language scores.
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63% improvement in arithmetic scores.
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55% of children have age-appropriate skills.
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Students enrolled in ThinkZone programs significantly outperformed comparison group by 40%-60% in number recognition and counting, in comparison skills and shape knowledge, in reading and writing, in division skills.
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Improvement in skills of educators - 52% using innovative teaching methods in the classroom.
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32% more parents are likely to engage with their children’s’ learning
They are currently (April 2023) engaging with 6000 educators and 48,000 children. Their vision is to reach 1M children.
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From ThinkZone India, 28/06/2023