Boy student

Cultivating Enriching Childhoods in India with Dost Education


Project type: Virtual or On-Site (Day of Service/Short-term available)

When: April to September

All parents are motivated to give their children the best education, but many resource-constrained families struggle to do so. Children with parents of low literacy levels have a 72% chance of being at the lowest reading level themselves. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult and sometimes impossible for many families to break this cycle of illiteracy and promote high levels of education.

Dost Education empowers parents of any literacy level to take charge of their child’s early education by providing tools to support their child’s early development and lifelong learning. Dost uses mobile technology, research-backed curriculum, machine learning, and behavior science to 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, with the right mix of: 

  • One-minute podcasts deployed via phone calls (“Phonecasts”)
  • Digital parent coaching
  • A peer-to-peer learning network 

Project Opportunity:

  • In response to COVID-19, Dost has had to entirely shift their model including how they reach and onboard new families. This has been made possible by dozens of new NPO and government partnerships. They are hoping for support with creating processes and technical integrations to maximize these partnerships and the number of families they can reach.
  • Dost is hoping to continue the expansion and personalization of their curriculum to meet parents’ most urgent needs. They would like support building out their technical system and content delivery processes to be more responsive to user needs.
  • An important part of Dost’s program is their commitment to quality data to track their impact. They would like support in building their Monitoring & Evaluation capacity through leveraging and training their “parent champion” network.

Impact: Dost has helped over 58,000 parents turn their homes into early learning environments and get their kids school ready.