Nexus of Good: Competitive brilliance

I was in Bengaluru last week and attended the local chapter meeting of the Nexus of Good. One of the presentations was by Ashok Kamath, Chairman of Akshara Foundation. Ashok and his team have been focusing on improving early math education in the government school system for over a decade and they have a model that addresses all stakeholders – their model is called Ganitha Kalika Andolana (GKA). Ashok spoke about one part of this model – on community engagement and this was an eye-opener for me. It was truly an andolana.

For a programme to be sustainable well beyond the organisation implementing it, every stakeholder needs to recognise its potential, take ownership of its outcomes and continue to implement it long after the exit of the original programme implementers from the geography. In other words, it needs to become ‘socially desirable’. Unless the locus of control moves from the supply side to the demand side (parents, SDMC members, education volunteers and gram panchayat leaders), the quality of schooling will not improve. Which is why, people collaborations are the nub of Akshara Foundation’s community-centric initiatives.

The Gram Panchayat Math Contest is a first-of-its-kind community initiative in India to encourage all concerned stakeholders to push for enhancing the quality of teaching and learning of mathematics, across the education system. These contests are an independent, transparent, out-of-school, curriculum-linked evaluation of children’s current math learning levels.

For the GP contests, the question paper is set by the District Institute for Education & Training (DIET) and printed by Akshara Foundation. Beyond that, these contests are organised entirely by the community members and, of course, facilitated by Akshara. On the chosen day, children in grades 4, 5 and 6 turn up at the contest venues, usually at the GP headquarters or school forecourts. They sit in neat, disciplined rows, under a colourful shamiana, and await their maths test. The timer is set to 1 hour as they begin the test. Education Volunteers from the villages evaluate the answer sheets soon after the hour is over, before finally announcing the winners. The Education Volunteers are local village youth who are educated and willing to give time and effort to helping their community without any monetary reward, and are identified, selected and trained by Akshara's Field Coordinators.

The concept of Gram Panchayat Maths Contests has opened up many a healthy dialogue between stakeholders like parents, teachers and other community members regarding their children’s learning levels.

The fascinating aspects of these contests are:

1. Transparency at the core: The contests adopt a transparent approach, providing a fun setting for assessing children's maths skills. The tests are administered in a manner where the integrity of the test is not compromised.

2. Local involvement: The contests are entirely managed by trained education volunteers and GP team leaders within each Gram Panchayat.

3. Objective evaluation: Observers, including teachers and parents, can witness the contests but are not permitted to intervene during the process. There is a definite Lakshman Rekha beyond which parents and teachers are not allowed and this is strictly enforced.

4. Swift recognition: Winners are promptly announced, and prizes distributed within three hours, enhancing the excitement and impact of the initiative. Children are excited to see their friends win prizes and they also get inspired to do better in the next year’s edition.

5. Community-driven: The programme is entirely funded by communities, showcasing a collective commitment to education with an average of INR 15,000 raised per participating Gram Panchayat.

6. Impressive participation: The contests have high levels of attendance, very often higher than daily attendance levels in schools

In the year ending March 2024, Akshara facilitated 4,160 Gram Panchayat Math Contests in Karnataka and 361 such contests in three districts of Odisha. In Karnataka alone, more than 4,70,000 children participated in these contests. Once the contest is over, Akshara: (a) submits a report (within 30 days) to each GP President where they share the results for every school in the GP and the performance in math competencies by grade (grades 4,5,6). Akshara also shares what topics were difficult for children and shares QR codes leading to the appropriate Akshara Teacher Training videos available on DIKSHA (the Ministry of Education portal); the idea is that teachers can then focus more on those hard topics. (b) Akshara also analyses all the responses from all the children to find out how many children (in each district) could answer 8 out of 20 questions correctly and this is where the outcomes are interesting.

The lowest performing district for Grade 4 was Kalaburagi and even here 40 per cent of the children got 8 out of 20 questions correctly. The highest performing district was Belagavi where 86 per cent of the children got 8 out of 20 questions correctly. And the performance in Grades 5 and 6 were even better.

This is a lot different from what we have been seeing in the past, including from other surveys done in the state. Akshara’s data is verifiable and auditable and they have retained in storage all the answer sheets from the children (they plan to keep this with them for a maximum period of two years).

So, how did this happen? 40,546 education volunteers gave their best to conduct and manage these 4,160 GP contests across 28 districts in the state, covering over 22,000 schools. They reached out to the communities, the local officials and the schools to organise these contests. It was relally a test for all the stakeholders. In the calendar year 2024, Akshara plans to do another edition of the GP contests and expects to cover nearly 5,000 Gram Panchayats and over 7,00,000 children in Karnataka. Akshara also plans to scale this up in Odisha. This year, it has a target to get more than 1,00,000 children to participate in over 500 GP contests there. This is truly scaling up in the spirit of Nexus of Good, and even more interestingly, the scaling up is sustainable because of the involvement of the entire community.

Views expressed are personal