The rapid spread of the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted almost the entire world. The British charity Save the Children has declared this as an ‘unprecedented education emergency’, as ten million children may never return to school following this disruption of their education. In India, all educational activities came to a standstill with the announcement of a complete lockdown in March. However, the impact of the crisis has also offered us some fantastic opportunities to innovate and try new approaches, and our teams in India have developed response strategies in partnership with their state governments. Our response during the Covid-19 lockdown focused on maintaining contact with district officials, managing continuity for certain programmatic activities, and collaboration with state officials to plan and build momentum for remote engagement with officials, teachers and students.
Our core learnings include:
- Together with government officials, it is possible to offer virtual models of programme delivery keeping the programme design and delivery contextualised and easy to understand. In the future, virtual delivery of training programmes is expected to increase, so it is important that we look at this seriously.
- Officials and teachers can be brought together to use digital platforms. However, the last mile connectivity between the teachers and students is still a challenge.
- Digital tools such as video creation can be an efficient way to deliver content during facilitation of an orientation session, and it has helped us to concentrate on creating quality processes.
- Digital delivery of our programme modules has helped us to achieve greater uniformity in content delivery, and recorded sessions can reach those who are unable to attend in-person sessions.
Read our case study in full here.
