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Welcome to the Great Madhav Chavan

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 stations" for technology - using your flash drive or mobile to download information you want from any kiosk throughout the five countries where Pratham works. From these and in conjunction with real instructors, youth and children can earn "certificates." His current certificates for Pratham-Taj Hotels (which includes the Pierre in New York) hospitality training are a great example of creating marketable human capital investments without bricks and teachers, but instructors and "when you can just in time" learning.


Paul Kim echoed many of same philosophical principals, learning needs to be de-linked and fun and relevant to livelihoods again. His last slide, a real eye popping graphic on how learning constantly evolves and needs to be constantly contextualized, reminded me so much of my favorite higher education program back in the United States, Singularity University.

I spoke about the Rainbow School, I talked about how fantastic the teachers were, how they worked through the recent strikes in Hyderabad and only stopped for Dasara. But Pratham is the way to help all the children in India, the government cannot do alone all the things required in a young democracy.

Here is a last picture of all the people, including Pritam wearing a Stanford shirt in Georgetown colors (super cool!).

Here is Pritam and Vivek in his office after the meeting.

More pictures are on Pritam's blog: http://pritamkabe.wordpress.com/

Rainbow School and Kappy:
I miss you all every day, you are the inspiration for everything I do. Pritam told me you need a playground, I agree. We need one! How do we do? Please write back!

Comments

  1. Madhav gave away his Stanford golf hat to Rukmini but kept the Stanford shirt (in HINDI!) and showed it to everyone

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nice Nursery Kids playing ideas added by you,Thanks a lot for sharing.
    Top Nursery Schools in India

    ReplyDelete

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