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.
Key Benefits of Veedum Vizhippum App:
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.
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!
Co Founder, Madhi Foundation