Rainbow Primary School

Vivek at the Poli Sci deparment has a brilliant blog with his articles, on corruption and more. (My fav of his pages: "Naan Fiction," get it - Naan like the bread? naan like roti? naan... you get it) Please take 5 mins to read his "From Fractions to Millions" because this is what I'm going to dedicate my work life to for the next however many decades. This work and NGO work like Pratham are the hope for my Rainbow Kids to reach their dreams - literacy, life skills, fair chance to have a livelihood, accountable government. http://viveks.info/from-fractions-to-millions-getting-more-people-to-challenge-corruption-using-mobile-phones Visited my old headsmitress' family in San Jose (her son Suresh is at HP), played with the one year old (just got her head shaved for her 1 years ceremony). I miss my Rainbow School student's little brothers and sisters so much. It was so fun to "recruit" them every day - I would stop every baby and say, ...

My new friend, Pritam (see the last post) left Hyderabad and the Rainbow School, came all the way from India to Stanford University to join a group of us to welcome Madhav Chavan, the founder and director of Pratham, one of the largest NGOs in the world and certainly my top pick for most effective. Paul Kim, CTO and Assistant Dean at the School of Education, Vivek Srinivasan who runs the Program on Liberation Technology on campus, Molly McMahon who is an impact investor in the budget private school space in developing countries, Pritam and myself hosted Madhav for a roundtable discussion on innovation and how we want to help Pratham, and how we don't know how exactly to do it but want to experiment and innovate alongside his needs. Madhav spoke of how the next years for Pratham will not be like the past, how we can build schools as fast as possible, but there will not be enough teachers - certainly not enough good ones. From this need, he talked about creating "learning ...