Addressing the Generational Cycle of Illiteracy
Many resource-constrained families struggle to give their children the best education, particularly in the early years. Experts agree on a cost-effective yet overlooked approach to address this cycle of illiteracy: empower parents to promote early childhood development at home.
In India, there are still over 160 million illiterate women. Over 11 million of whom are between the ages of 15 and 24 years old. These women become mothers desire better opportunities for their children in education but lack the resources to do so.
Dost Education Helps Families Support their Child’s Education
Dost Education‘s vision is to turn every home into a learning center by giving parents of any literacy level the tools to support their child’s early development and lifelong learning. In particular, they use mobile technology, research-backed curriculum, machine learning, and behavioral science. These resources solve everyday parenting problems and nudge parents to nurture cognitive and socio-emotional development in their kids.
Dost’s local-language platform delivers a consistent, personalized and need-based learning experience for each parent. Specifically, the platform contains one-minute podcasts that teach parents how to engage students in learning at home via phone calls (“Phonecasts”). Through their free audio programs, Dost has helped over 58,000 parents turn their homes into early learning environments.
Team4Tech Enables Capacity for Online Learning
In response to COVID-19, Team4Tech supported Dost in entirely shifting their outreach and onboard model for families to virtual. By partnering with Team4Tech, Dost designed a process to create engaging, relevant, and targeted phonecast content to support their parents and create a greater sense of community. In detail, Dost reached over 30K families and approximately 60K pre-primary learners in 2020. Through the continued help of Team4Tech, Dost anticipates supporting over 100,000 families in 4 states in the next 12 months.
Get Involved with Team4Tech and Our Partners
If you would like to learn more about our work, subscribe to the Team4Tech mailing list. You can read about more projects supporting early childhood development at home. Then, you can follow the progression of other international projects and hear from the experiences of corporate and non-profit partners alike.