root cause analysis.

problem: illiteracy in India — this is a problem with the parents & trickles down to the students.

top causes:

• poverty causing an inability for parents to pay private school fees. this forces parents to send kids to gov-funded public schools which are low-quality education providers that have stronger ties to a childcare center than a school.

• teacher quality is poor. 1 in every 5 teachers in India is unqualified to teach (1.94M). they are hired to meet the overpopulated classrooms students are in. the government wanted to increase education so they increased the % of students in class. as they did this, the quality or need of teachers wasn’t considered. when they realized this problem, they began issuing teacher certificates to unqualified individuals as long as they could serve in the class.

  • some teachers are unqualified to teach math but are doing it anyway. the government sees this as better than having no teacher.
  • one of the solutions is teaching training. but, the governments budget allocation to teacher training lessening each year. in 2019-20, no $ was given to teacher training.
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  cause we’re focusing on: our team chose quality of teachers b/c:

  • this has the most direct impact on students. ‘untrained teachers have a greater impact on students than them not being in school.’
  • parents are incentivized to pay $5/month for a mobile platform that teaches students skills they need to succeed vs. $300/month in private school tuition. we are providing a high quality, affordable platform for these students to get educated.

  addressing counter-intuitiveness: if the main problem is teacher training, why are you focusing on students?

  teachers aren’t incentivized to get trained more. they don’t make any more money b/c of training and they are giving more time to a job that already underpays them.

  because of this, we’re going direct-student, offering them a mobile platform that includes the foundations of knowledge they need from ages 5-11 with high quality teachers & experiences.

  as for economic incentives, parents in rural India know that college entrance exams are important. they’d like to pay for their student to attend school but it costs too much; they don’t make enough $ in their day job to pay for this.

  we’ve done a mock income statement calculation and there is enough disposable income for families to pay $5/month or 382.5 Rs for our platform.