Masoom (www.masoomeducation.org) is a not-for-profit organization founded by Ms. Nikita Ketkar in 2008 with a passion for establishing quality education in night schools. Masoom has a vision to support youth "learn while they earn". Masoom aims to establish quality education in night schools, through its Night School Transformation Program (NSTP). Night school students are mostly those who work during the day to support their families and have previously dropped out of school due to financial difficulties. However, their ambition for better job opportunities brings them back to school, even after a long day at work.
Masoom has developed a 3-pronged intervention model consisting of interdependent focus areas for school transformation, namely: Education Infrastructure and Inputs, Capacity Building for all Stakeholders and Advocating Night School issues for policy level changes . Masoom’s NSTP has been designed such that it can be easily replicated and implemented in other schools and states across India. It is the only comprehensive model in use in the history of Night Schools.
Masoom is presently working in 85 night schools of Mumbai. Masoom plans to reach out to 170 night schools by 2023 impacting 15,000 night school students in Maharashtra.
Masoom has seen a significant improvement in all key parameters such as enrolment, reduced dropouts, higher success in SSC exams and a larger number of students ultimately wanting to pursue careers with vocational training.
They have seen an increase in attendance from 34% to 57% and SSC (10th grade) pass percentage from 36% to 83%. Students securing first class have escalated from 5% in 2008 to 18%.
Till 2019-20, 1800 students have been provided Short Term Vocational Courses on 15 different Courses and 101 students were provided with Long Term Courses through the Career Cell of Masoom. So far 532 students have been placed in various sectors.
In order to improve the outcomes of night schools it was important to address practical issues such as low enrolment, low attendance, less nutrition in a timely manner. The availability of accurate, live data on all these parameters became critical as the number of schools were scaling quickly.
Koita Foundation worked with Masoom to digitally transform the business processes, and put together a comprehensive system for end to end management of the schools and student performance.
This has greatly increased operational efficiencies and reduced paperwork at all levels. It has become easier to monitor programs and to take quick, data based decisions in a timely manner.
The current staff at Masoom was managing all processes manually - including attendance, performance tracking, student communication, and student nutrition. Lack of systems led to insufficient availability of data, data integrity issues, and made it more difficult to monitor and manage programs. It also resulted in inefficiencies in managing processes such as distribution of student material and nutrition .
Given resource constraints, Masoom was seeking a platform which would be easy for teachers, adminstrators and program heads to monitor real time school data such as attendance, enrolment, lectures conducted and take operational decisions in a timely manner. They also wanted real-time data to identify high risk schools & take corrective actions. Of course all of this had to be achieved with technology which was really easy to use and cost efficient.
Koita Foundation worked with Masoom to develop Drishti - a comprehensive school management system (including a mobile application) for end-to-end management of schools and student performance . Masoom teachers (school leaders) enter live data such as attendance and student performance in Drishti School app. Drishti School also enables teachers to share this information with student on WhatsApp - creating an integrated experience. School leaders also record daily details regarding nutrition program and material distribution for each school. Drishti Admin provides the Masoom managers with a comprehensive view across all schools with drill down reports and analysis.
Drishti platform has enabled Masoom to digitally transform itself and create more scalable processes, which will help Masoom continue to grow rapidly from 85 night schools to hundreds of schools across India.
Masoom is presently working in 85 night schools of Mumbai and plans to reach out to 170 night schools by 2023 impacting 15,000 night school students in Maharashtra. As they plan to scale their operations, managing data becomes more critical. The leadership team needs to analyze the performance of each school. Masoom needed custom reports for the same.
The Implementation of Power BI provided Masoom with a platform to view and analyze real-time data across all schools. This leads to better tracking of enrollment, attendance, and performance of each school. This data was used to drive performance and make impactful breakthroughs.
Masoom runs 85 night schools across Mumbai. It becomes difficult for the CEO to monitor progress and performance from different schools. This in turn had an impact on the ability to control operations, as well as analyze data from programs leading to delay in the decision-making process.
Koita Foundation worked with Masoom to develop the Masoom Power BI Platform. This platform unified all data across the schools into real-time dashboards and reports. It has reports for the academic year which are designed to compare target v/s achieved for various parameters like enrollment, attendance, baseline, endline, nutrition, etc. The targets are set for each parameter using the admin portal. The drill-down functionality helps the CEO view the data at various levels - program head, program manager level, and school level.
This has led to a more proactive resolution of issues and a deeper impact on beneficiaries. Moreover, it also helped to manage internal processes more smoothly.
As world is upgrading with technological advancements, it’s very important to bring contextual solutions on ground by leveraging technology to bring meaningful change. In Masoom’s journey of transforming Night schools, we realized the dire need of technology to solve on ground challenges on real time basis and decided to explore tech platforms to ease our work. With the Masoom-Drishti App provided by Koita foundation, we can track real time student’s attendance, enrollment and take corrective actions for critical schools. This has saved our lots of time to take program level decisions. This technological platform has made the entire process real time, paperless, timesaving and organized. We acknowledge and appreciate Koita Foundation’s support for the Masoom and thank them for making a difference in many lives.
"Awesome inputs from Rekha & Rizwan to design Masoom app that monitors the Program, we are super excited about this and we look forward to improving the efficiency of our program with the app".
Founder and CEO Masoom