Satabdee who has been born and brought up in Krushak Bazar slum of Cuttack city is currently pursuing her graduation and also teaching 11 children in her locality.
Satabdee, like many young people from the twin cities of Cuttack and Bhubaneswar, is a part of the ThinkZone Fellowship program that trains them to teach young children of their communities. The youth learn new skills via online and offline training which is spread over the fellowship program. During the fellowship, the youth implement foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) learning camps for children using technology and home-based resources. The youth get pocket allowances and certification for completing the fellowship and continue getting paid for teaching children for a few hours a day.
Satabdee says, ‘I have faced a lot of challenges while growing up and despite this, I want to pursue higher studies and also learn new things. The ThinkZone fellowship program is helping me develop new skills as well as providing me the opportunity to support young children in my neighborhood. I don’t want these children to struggle to receive a good education at an early age as I faced’.
This unique fellowship program has been started by ThinkZone, a social enterprise that uses digital solutions and a community-based approach to provide quality learning to young children from low-income communities. The program is supported by Fondation Botnar – a Swiss-based foundation that champions the use of AI and digital technology to improve the well-being of young people in urban environments.
The new National Education Policy mentions that over 5 crore children currently in primary school have not attained foundational literacy and numeracy, i.e., the ability to read and comprehend basic text and the ability to carry out basic addition and subtraction with Indian numerals. According to the National Education Policy, the highest priority of the education system should be to achieve universal foundational literacy and numeracy in primary school by 2025.
The fellowship program has been designed based on the new National Education Policy which has suggested establishing community-led models backed by technology to support learners, in the mission to promote foundational literacy and numeracy.
As a country, if we don’t tackle the problem of education in the early years, it’s really unlikely many children will be able to catch up. They drop out or learn very little. The ThinkZone fellowship program focuses on youth supporting young children in their own communities to attain mastery of numeracy and literacy.
The fellowship program uses a blended strategy of accessible digital solutions and instructor-led offline support to train young people like Satabdee on pedagogy, communication, technology usage, and personal development.
The youth utilize the ThinkZone mobile application which can also run without internet connectivity to teach children. The activity-based teaching content mentioned in the platform act as a guide they can follow to engage children. The platform also provides youth to manage children’s records, evaluate and track learning goals and capture real-time data.
The youth access the training content available on the ThinkZone mobile application to continuously up-skill themselves. Apart from this, they are supported with regular offline and online skill-enhancement workshops which aid in their overall development and lead to better job opportunities in the future.
ThinkZone continuously tracks the development of skill sets and overall engagement level of young people via the mobile application which enables us to personalize their learning trajectory over a period of time.
ThinkZone with support from Fondation Botnar would be on-boarding 6000 fellows over the next 3 years who would be providing quality learning opportunities to more than 35000 young children in their communities.
