Chili Pili : An early start

Globally more than 610 million children and adolescents are not achieving basic proficiency. This learning crisis has its roots in children’s earliest years when failure to invest in quality early childhood education results in children starting school behind in a host of developmental domains. India is home to approximately 159 million children in the age group of 0-6 years, constituting 13.2 percent of the total population. It is imperative to ensure holistic development for them to achieve their full potential. 

The Anganwadis are the focal centers for the delivery of services for children and mothers across villages and wards in urban slums. An Anganwadi covers a population of about 1000, thus making the Anganwadi worker the last mile connectivity for many government schemes. With the immense workload coupled with no training, the Anganwadi worker is not equipped to engage children constructively. 

There exists little or no monitoring on the education front which leaves the worker from having to invest time or interest in thinking of activities for the children. The training received is more focused on record keeping, collection and maintenance and less on pedagogy. 

Our focus on pedagogic content will help the worker engage students with activities with it’s focus on 5 developmental domains namely: socio-emotional, physical, cognitive, language and numeracy and creative expression. The content will be mapped to the curriculum designed by the ICDS. We will create bite-sized teachers facing content mapped to the Chili Pili curriculum.

The content will be a mix of activities complemented by training videos for the Anganwadi worker. This would help her have a productive day in her center with the students. The content will be enriched with audio stories, songs, and rhymes for the worker to sing or narrate to the students. Our focus will be to ensure the Anganwadi worker understands key pedagogical concepts and milestones of children in different age groups. The tasks and activities drawn up can be created with limited resources. 

These pedagogic instructions and activities will be delivered to the worker via an Android App which can be downloaded for free on their smartphone. The App will also provide her with other features such as timely notifications, ability to track growth, recipes for cooking nutritious meals, share progress with parents and ideas for parents to engage with their children at home. We understand that at the core of learning at this age students need to touch feel and experience the learning and so along with resources and training to the teachers we would be offering Manipulative for each center.

We wish to pilot this product across 100 Anganwadis, impacting 100 Anganwadi workers and around 3500 students in the year 2020. Each of the Anganwadi workers will be provided with a tablet with the content loaded and manipulative's. 3 training's over 1 year will be conducted for efficient uptake and implementation of our program.

Over the course of the pilot, we wish to see the following impact:

1. Anganwadis go from being just a caregiving place to a vibrant place for the joyful and holistic development of all children.
2. Anganwadi workers pick up skills to understand a child's cognitive development and are equipped to engage them efficiently in order to help them develop in the 5 developmental domains. 
3. Anganwadi workers are looked upon as quality educators and not just data collectors
4. The Anganwadi worker values herself as an important part of the children's developmental goals.
5. There is reverse migration of kids from privately run day-care centers to the Anganwadis. 
6. Parents will start to play instrumental roles in the early development phase of their children. 
7. Children will be made school-ready when they leave the Anganwadi system. They will have basic proficiency in numeracy and literacy for their age.