Madhi Foundation (www.madhifoundation.org) is a non-profit organization based in Chennai, dedicated to reimagining the public-school systems and addressing educational inequity in India, particularly in Tamil Nadu. Established in 2016, Madhi has significantly expanded its reach from 3 schools in 2016 to 37,000 schools across the state of Tamil Nadu by 2021.
Madhi recognizes that the foundational learning crisis is complex and adopts a systemic approach for effecting transformational change. Their solutions address both the supply and demand sides of quality education. On the supply side, Madhi collaborates with government mechanisms to create holistic solutions, focusing on personalized training programs, improving teaching-learning materials, and implementing sophisticated monitoring systems. On the demand side, Madhi aims to galvanize parents and caregivers through awareness-building, strengthening agency, and encouraging ownership over their children’s right to quality foundational learning.
Madhi’s approach to education reform is holistic and comprehensive, with a focus on placing the last-mile child at the center of all program design decisions. Madhi has primarily focused on improving Foundational Learning in Tamil Nadu, leading to its appointment as the Chief Management Partner for Tamil Nadu’s official Foundational Learning Mission - a mission of national and regional importance.
- Students reached: 27,00,000.
- Teachers reached: 1,00,000.
- Conducted training for 55,921 teachers.
- Distributed ~37,000 Ennum Ezhuthum Kits to government schools in Tamil Nadu in phases.
- Deployed 175 Tamil Nadu Education Fellows across 38 districts in Tamil Nadu.
- Onboarded 60,000 teachers on the Telegram app.
- Rolled out the Palli Parvai Application to 38 districts across the state.
Boosting Parental Involvement with the Veedum Vizhippum App
Key Benefits of Veedum Vizhippum App:
- Effective onboarding of parents through simplified communication using IVRS and WhatsApp.
- Streamlined progress tracking to identify and close learning gaps.
- Improved engagement to foster a culture of quality foundational learning in rural Tamil Nadu.
- Comprehensive program management, including workshops, quizzes, and surveys.
- Efficient dissemination of student quizzes and monthly reports via WhatsApp.
- Enhanced supervision and district-level oversight for better program implementation.
Madhi Foundation’s Veedum Vizhippum program is designed to boost parental involvement in driving foundational learning outcomes across rural Tamil Nadu. Community Engagement Workers (CEWs) are key to this effort, responsible for engaging parents, building community support, and tracking student progress.
As the program expanded, managing interactions with thousands of parents manually became inefficient and difficult to scale. This posed a challenge for CEWs in delivering consistent support and oversight across regions.
To address this, Madhi Foundation, with support from Koita Foundation, launched the Veedum Vizhippum app-a powerful tool that enables CEWs to track progress, manage parent interactions, and enhance community engagement seamlessly. This digital solution streamlines operations, ensuring effective engagement as the program scales, and strengthens the overall impact of parental involvement on children's education.
- Community Engagement Workers (CEWs) at Madhi Foundation play a crucial role in engaging parents to support their children's education. However, managing and onboarding parents at scale can be a challenge, especially when ensuring that all key stakeholders are involved and actively participating.
- The Veedum Vizhippum app simplifies the entire process through structured workflows for member onboarding and management. It streamlines parent enrollment, ensuring every parent is registered, tracked, and actively involved. This system also enables CEWs to maintain consistent and organized records of parent interactions, strengthening oversight and ensuring engagement throughout the program.
- Additionally, the app facilitates community engagement and surveys, enabling CEWs to conduct organized workshops, meetings, and surveys that gather valuable insights from parents. These tools ensure that community support remains strong, fostering a deeper connection between parents and their children’s learning journey.
- Community Engagement Workers (CEWs) at Madhi Foundation are essential in maintaining strong communication with parents to support their children's education. However, ensuring consistent, timely interactions can be difficult, especially when managing communication at scale across diverse regions.
- The Veedum Vizhippum app addresses this challenge by offering integrated IVRS and WhatsApp communication protocols. These multiple channels provide CEWs with flexible, reliable methods to stay in regular contact with parents and caregivers.
- This system ensures that important updates, progress reports, and educational information are shared effectively, fostering consistent engagement and keeping parents actively involved in their children’s learning. By utilizing these communication tools, CEWs can strengthen the connection between families and the educational process, creating a seamless flow of information and support throughout the program.
- Supervisors at Madhi Foundation play a vital role in guiding and managing Community Engagement Workers (CEWs) across districts. However, overseeing multiple CEWs, ensuring accuracy in their work, and monitoring district-wide progress can be a complex task.
- The Veedum Vizhippum app simplifies supervision through a comprehensive and structured workflow. It enables supervisors to manage their teams effectively by providing tools for veracity checks on surveys or quizzes conducted by CEWs. This ensures the reliability of data and maintains program integrity.
- Additionally, the app facilitates joint visits with CEWs to engage with parents directly, fostering collaboration and strengthening parental involvement. Supervisors can track overall district progress with detailed dashboards and reports, offering valuable insights for strategic decision-making.
- By streamlining supervision processes and enhancing oversight capabilities, the Veedum Vizhippum app empowers supervisors to ensure consistent implementation and drive impactful outcomes at the district level.
Koita Foundation has been an instrumental partner in enabling and amplifying our impact. They bring a purpose and impact first approach which is inspiring and rare in the ecosystem. They deeply care about the impact - this is evidenced through their in-person visits to the site, focus group discussions with users and deep engagement with programme and technological partners.
At Madhi Foundation, our initiative Veedum Vizhippum focuses on raising awareness about Foundational Learning Goals among parents and caregivers. To scale this effectively, we needed a robust, technology-enabled platform that could support our Community Engagement Workers (CEWs) in engaging with families, managing home visits, tracking attendance, conducting surveys, and delivering content through SMS, WhatsApp, and IVRS. We also required strong data analytics and dashboards for monitoring programme progress.
The app was critical to empowering field workers and supervisors, driving parent engagement at scale, providing actionable insights & supporting scale and adaptability. Together with the Koita team, we not only have built a world class app for managing our programme, but we have also refined the programme and scaled effortlessly from 300 parents to 30,000 parents in a year.
We are immensely grateful for the opportunity to not only get funded by the Koita team but collaborate with them. We look forward to deepening our partnership and impact in the coming years!
Srivathsan Ramaswamy
Co Founder, Madhi Foundation