Developing effective teachers
Although Pratham’s capital-light strategy has enabled it to grow, the organization’sability to develop committed and loyal teachers is the key to itssocial impact. Recruiting and training more than 6,000 teachers and 250supervisors who receive below-market stipends has not been easy. Ensuringthe consistent delivery of quality instruction is perhaps even more difficult,considering that most of Pratham’s teachers have a high-school education orless and no teaching experience.
Recruiting and retention
Overcoming these problems has required creative new solutions to the nonprofitversion of the “war for talent” because Pratham pays balwadi teachersonly 250 rupees (about $6) a month. Unskilled jobs such as domestic servicepay two to five times as much. Sometimes Pratham’s teachers earn up to200 rupees more from tuition fees, but many waive them for poorer parents.From the outset, it was obvious that Pratham couldn’t afford certified teachersand would be unlikely to attract people already working full-time for a living.Instead, the organization decided to recruit people from outside the workforceand to give them extensive training.
In India, as in many other developing countries, unmarried young womentraditionally don’t work outside the home. These women, many of whomhave had a fair amount of education, make ideal balwadi teachers. To attractthem, Pratham has seen to it that balwadi teachers work only part-time andin their local communities. It has also publicized the importance and socialimpact of the program, thereby increasing the job’s social stature, and hasactively cultivated the organization’s brand name.
Young women who would otherwise not be working thus join Pratham tohelp their communities. Since its first wave of hires, found as organizerscanvassed Mumbai’s neighborhoods to sign up children for the program,recruiting has relied exclusively on word of mouth. Turnover is low: untiltwo years ago, when nearly a thousand top-performing balwadi teachersmoved on to teach bridge courses or to serve in the remedial program, mostPratham teachers had worked for their balwadi since its inception. The fewteachers who leave typically do so because they are moving or getting married,though many others who marry stay on. Job vacancies are never evenlisted, since departing teachers find and train replacements before leaving.
To inspire this kind of loyalty, Pratham builds a sense of community andempowerment among its staff, much as it does among its corporate partners.A balwadi teacher views her class almost as a start-up venture, since she islikely to have started it and developed its activities herself. Pratham’s highlydecentralized organization fosters this sense of ownership: balwadi inMumbai are divided into 50 autonomous mahila mandals (“women’sgroups”), each registered as a separate NGO. Budgets, training, and oversightprocesses for all programs are determined centrally, but all other detailsare left to each teacher and ward. Pratham’s ultimate vision is for thesewomen’s groups to become completely self-sufficient, linked to headquartersonly for training and oversight. Already, several balwadi now finance themselvesthrough a combination of tuition fees and contributions from localcharities. This decentralized approach has solved a problem all large organizationsface: how to release the creativity and energy of thousands of peopleand avoid bureaucratic inertia.
Even as new programs have been added, Pratham’s recruiting strategy has proved unexpectedly robust. When the organization started to open itscomputer-training centers, it was thought that a more formal recruitingprogram would be needed. Before recruiting began, however, word of mouthgenerated a surprising number of applicants (including some who had better-paid jobs) with basic computer skills. These people wanted an opportunityfor advancement, and the computer-center teachers have since formed theirown companies and are franchising their model in poor areas of Mumbai.
Pratham’s recruiting strategy can easily be applied outside India. In all countries,a large number of people don’t work full-time, for a variety of reasons.The challenge for nonprofits is to use their creativity to develop positionsthat can make use of the knowledge, skills, and enthusiasm of these people.
Ensuring high-quality instruction
Many nonprofit organizations—and many companies—believe that givingworkers freedom means ignoring performance management. Pratham hastaken the opposite approach: by maintaining strict performance standardsand providing systematic training, it can turn people without teaching experienceinto effective instructors who then have the freedom to develop their balwadi.
Today, Pratham maintains 24 teams responsible for both preparing and evaluatingteachers. The teams run rigorous pre- and in-service training programsfor them, attend their meetings, and make frequent unannounced visits toevery balwadi, where teachers are evaluated on how children respond andbehave in class. Children, in turn, are evaluated for physical, behavioral, andcognitive development, and report cards are sent home three times a year.This type of formal training and monitoring infrastructure is rare in the nonprofitworld because of budget constraints and a reluctance to spend moneyon overhead. But Pratham has found that such an infrastructure is critical toachieving the organization’s goals.
The ultimate test of Pratham’s strategy is its impact on educational outcomes,and here the evidence is overwhelming. A recent study found thatPratham’s balwadi students are far more likely to go to primary school thanare children who haven’t been to preschool.2 More than 40 percent of thechildren in Pratham’s bridge course program are now in school, and testsshow that they are doing better in language arts and mathematics than theirclassmates. In the remedial program, tests show that the number of childrenwith no literacy or numeracy skills dropped by half and that the proportionof older children achieving basic educational competencies doubled.
Paresh Vaish Blog 