Transform the life trajectory of gifted government school students from low-income families

Avanti seeks to decrease the educational inequity in India by addressing the systemic bias, which exists against low-income students seeking admission to India’s premier universities. A STEM undergraduate degree leads to a 4-fold increase in daily wages for rural students. STEM graduates are twice as employable as non-STEM undergraduates in well compensated professional jobs. Furthermore, admission into the top 10% of elite colleges leads to a 10-fold increase in wages. However, students from government schools are severely under-represented in India’s top engineering colleges. Students from low-income homes have less than a 1.5% chance of qualifying for the national entrance exam, IIT-JEE making them more than 7-times less likely to gain access to India's top colleges. India’s most marginalized must be represented in the leadership of India’s technology, professional services, and research sectors. 

Due to the lockdown measures, thousands of students across our country are trying to continue learning as the pandemic disrupted their regular education. Their progress is severely compromised without access to digital devices that would let them keep learning online.

Our pedagogical program aims to create a level playing field for students of Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya (JNV) aspiring for STEM careers. The JNVs are a system of 638 central residential schools run by Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti, an autonomous organization under the Ministry of Education, for talented students predominantly from rural areas.

Our program provides academic support and career guidance needed to be accepted into India’s top STEM programs. Conduct online test preparation programs for high-potential students from disadvantaged backgrounds in rural India for competitive exams to gain admission into India’s premium Engineering and Medical institutes.

Due to Covid necessitated school closures, about 7,500 government school students switched to learning via Avanti’s digital content, workbooks with online facilitation via Zoom live classes, WhatsApp-based doubt solving, and live assessments. Avanti’s online learning program covers:

• 3 hours every weekday of online after school training, which will aim to cover ~500 core STEM topics 
• 2 hours of self-learning / after-class revision and practice assignments each day in line with the materials covered in-class via WhatsApp
• Active engagement with students on doubt solving via calls and over 250 WhatsApp groups 
• 300 hours each year of audio-video content, worksheets, and assessments 

The Covid-19 necessitated school closures have suddenly and deeply impacted students and learning patterns. The JNV schools were worse hit due to their residential education system. While the JNVs have been efficient in their teaching process, they lack the infrastructure and bandwidth to address a large audience on online platforms. However, Avanti Fellows continued its efforts towards providing competitive test preparation during this period via live classes on Zoom. The JNV Samiti appreciated our efforts and has requested us to extend this program to other JNV schools.

Our core program in 10 schools across 4 states and 1 union territory in early 2020 has now expanded to 211 schools in 17 states and 5 union territories with an overall total of 7,500 students in grades 11 and 12. Our decade-long pedagogical experience coupled with a technology-enabled online learning program in the last six months provides a strong proven model to extend the online facilitation program to 7,500 students to have equitable access to quality subject content. 

In the program’s 10-year history, 60% of our students have been placed in the top 10% premier institutes in India - the highest acceptance rate of any test-preparation program in the country. In 2020, 62.6% of Avanti’s students qualified for IIT-JEE Main (national average was 27%) and 50.63% qualified IIT-JEE Advanced exam.

Avanti Fellows with its other learning programs runs among the largest digital learning initiatives in India for government school students with over 2M monthly active learners.

Please note: We are not accepting donations from international donors for this campaign.