Madhav Chavan leads Pratham, whose goal is to ensure that every child is in school and learning well. Pratham works across urban and rural India, mobilizing volunteers to execute low-cost solutions to maximize government efforts. Starting by setting up pre-schools in community spaces or people’s homes in slums, Pratham introduces remedial literacy learning in Indian schools and focuses on measuring outcomes. It launched Read India, which has trained over a million volunteers and teachers, reaching more than 34 million children. Pratham also created partnerships that publish children’s books and provide computer and English learning. It developed the Annual Status of Education Report, a nationwide household survey that assesses the impact of government spending on education.
Social entrepreneurs don't generally set out to incite protests or topple despots, but they are revolutionaries nonetheless. They understand that wars can be waged by a thousand cuts; that crimes against humanity occur when millions of children die of diarrhea or tetanus; when medicine fails the poor; when education squanders young educators and sacrifices its young.
They refuse to accept that this is reality, the status quo, just the way things are. They know better and they set out to make it so.
The 2011 Skoll award winners we honor tonight offer scalable, proven solutions to these toughest of problems and to the unacceptable conditions of poverty and injustice that breed and sustain them. Madhav Chavan, Pratham. Madhav Chavan founded Pratham in 1993 to address India's educational crisis. 140 million of the country's children, 95% of whom are enrolled in primary schools, can neither read nor perform mathematics at age or grade appropriate levels.
Pratham's approach emphasizes simple, low-cost solutions. It bases its programs in homes and temples. It trains mothers and volunteers to reinforce math and reading instruction and insists on rigorous assessment to insure interventions succeed.
At the height of its flagship Read India campaign, Pratham reached 17% of India's children, covering 21 states and one out of every two villages. Literacy levels improved dramatically. So much so that the campaign has transitioned to scale up its results through partnership with state and local governments.
Beyond its direct interventions and the disciplined self assessment, Pratham created the annual Status of Education report, the only measurement of children's literacy and numeracy conducted at scale in India today. Madhav and his senior staff serve on educational policy making bodies at state and central government levels.
They innovate and test, implement and prove, and then partner and serve with government to transform public education for India's children. Madhav Chavan, Pratham.
Thank you, Academy. Always wanted to say that. And there is an aspiring actor inside me and it helps to know that Jeff's call is into movies as well.
And I think that the Skoll Awards are the Oscars of social enterprise. Don't you think?
Now I have a problem, because most of the things that I wanted to say as context to my speech, Sally has already said. So I can tell you some stories instead of some other thoughts. I know Ben is looking forward to those.
You see, there are two hundred million children in India. Two hundred and ten million are children, Sally has given you some statistics. 97 percent of those, and we verified that through humongous surveys which we do every year, 97 percent are enrolled in school. Most schools, more than 90% schools, get midday meals.
All children are given textbook, not always on time, but they get textbooks. All the children are provided free uniforms, two sets. In many states now, the government are giving bicycles to young girls to go to school. So, after all this. And there are teachers, as well. Not enough always but there are enough teachers.
So, why is Pratham doing anything at all? And so when we went out and did this annual status of education report, and we do it every year, we found that 50 percent of the children cannot read. My colleague, Dr. Rukmini Banerji tells a story of a bunch of volunteers going into a village in the northern province of India called Uttar Pradesh.
So, it's a village, and the village head, patriarch, is lying down on his charpai. Char is four, so it's a four legged; can't call it a bed; can 't call it a cot, and he's smoking his hookah. When he sees the volunteers, he's saying "What are you guys doing here?" They say, "Sir we're here to do a survey." "No, no, no, education is all fine, here all children go to school." And his three sons are standing there.
One is a third grader, another fifth grader and a seventh grader, well spaced. So somebody says, "Look, there's a simple test here," and the young kid starts looking and so they show it to him, and the third grader stumbles and he can't read. So, the hookah comes out and say, "OK, give it to the other guy".
So the fifth grader starts reading very, very haltingly, can't read. Now the man is sitting up. The third guy, the seventh grader, is saying, "I don't want to take this test". So, he says, "Get me my shirt". He's sitting bare chested. "I want to check every house in this village, what the heck is going on?"
And so he goes out and checks and low and behold he finds that most children can't really read. Now this actually is a picture of India which symbolizes what's going on. Parents think children go to school, so they must be learning. Teachers think children come to school, I teach them, so they must be learning.
And the policy makers are happy with all that and say, "Great!". So, when we do this survey, village after village after village, it's a wake up call. Policy is not that easy to change; establishment doesn't change that easily. Evidence in my corners of the world is not always helpful. So we have to start telling people simplify,
simplify the assessment, simplify the methods, so even the most ordinary people who are capable of doing extraordinary things as we heard, they will get up and say I want to educate my child. Whose responsibility is it to educate our children? Government. Well, it's easy to point fingers, but as you heard perhaps in your childhood, when you point one finger at somebody there are three fingers pointing at yourself.
You better do something about it, look at it another way; if it was your child who could not read, would you blame the government? Advocacy. Would you go out and lobby? Or would you start teaching your child? I think both are required. While you tell the government to do things, you have to get up and start doing something by yourself and I'm proud that I live in the country of Mahatma Gandhi who said, "get up and do it. Do it yourself." So we, the Pratham volunteers people, go out and start talking. Mahatma Gandhi walked 23 days, 300 kilometers and picked up salt against the British Empire.
What country is this now? OK.
Hundreds of thousands joined him, and history of India was changed. And now you don't have to walk for 23 days, not 300 kilometers, just pick up a book. Don't pick up salt and read with a few children in your village. Hundreds of thousands will join you and the history of India will change once again.
It's a very powerful message. And that's how, by the thousands volunteers come up.
Now, the problem is, while these volunteers come, they are also victims of the same education system. They can't teach very well, they don't know math, they don't know reading properly. And so the Skoll Award is going to help us to build capacity of our own organization so we can do things not only on a large scale but do them better.
We need to build leadership so that people can do things on their own. I want to end by quoting Lao Tzu, a great Chinese philosopher poet and it's one of my favorites. It is a guiding principle of how we try to do work. It's not always easy. Lao Tzu said, "Go to the people, live among them, love them, learn from them, start with what they know, build on what they have and when it is done, they will say we did it ourselves".
It's not about Pratham, it's not about you, it's not about Skoll, it's about people changing their own lives. We would like the enable them as best as we can. Thank you.
