Pratham: an idea caught fire
It began in the autumn of 1992 with the visit from then Mayor of Baltimore, who had changed his city’s tagline from The Garden City to The City That Reads. He was seeking to eliminate illiteracy, particularly among his fellow people of colour. Our boss, UNICEF India Country Representative Eimi Watanabe said: “Couldn’t we take up something as ambitious here?” From that challenge came the idea of creating a city-wide movement to assure that every child in Mumbai, then known as Bombay, would be able to exercise their right to education.
Achieving an ambitious vision is not business as usual. This had to be a societal movement. So, with Bollywood on our doorstep and Mumbai being the financial capital of India, the small UNICEF Field Office set its sights on garnering their support. With crucial input from colleagues in the Country Office, we drew up a list of 150 of Mumbai’s movers and shakers. Each received an individual letter, explaining why it was every child's right to have an education, and why it made sense for them to get involved. Over half of them responded, which led to some 75 individual meetings. Eventually a group of about 45 organisations and individuals came together to work with the State and City governments to get things moving.
Once people were on board, it soon became apparent that, to be taken seriously, hard facts and figures would be needed to demonstrate what needed to be done. How many kids were not in school? Who were the children losing out? At what age were the poorest starting and leaving school? How was the education system failing children? We hired a couple of specialists: Madhav Chavan and Farida Lambe. Remember these names. Their job was to identify the bottlenecks, of which the most important were the extremely low coverage of pre-school programmes for the poorest kids living in slums, and lack of reliable spaces in slum dwellings for study after school.
The biggest hurdle turned out to be institutional. We wanted what was provisionally called the Bombay Educational Initiative to be sustainable, not dependent on UNICEF, a movement that truly belonged to people and society in the City of Mumbai. A steering committee was formed, initially chaired by the head of the Godrej industrial conglomerate, whom everyone recognised as influential and respected. But leadership at this point was not exactly dynamic. Madhav Chavan suggested we approach the then Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Board of India. We met him; he agreed to take it on; and within a week he had passed away. What to do next?
Fortunately, Madhav was, and is, not only an outstanding educationalist but someone endowed with great strategic sense. He approached the Chairman of the Industry Credit and Investment Corporation of India (ICICI), then a leading public sector bank, now operating in the private sector. Mr. N. Vaghul injected two very important ingredients into the mix, which helped to ignite the whole project: a huge amount of personal energy; and the investment of ICICI’s corporate social capital. He also put Madhav and Farida on the payroll of ICICI, further assuring a lessening of dependency on UNICEF.
Now the movement needed a name, and Madhav and Farida came up with Pratham, which in English means first; in Marathi, the State language of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital, Prathamik Shikshan (प्राथमिक शिक्षण) means primary education. Under that name, Pratham registered as a public trust.
Of course, Mr. Vaghul did not lead alone. The then Municipal Commissioner and State Secretary of School Education were solidly behind the movement. These were visionary leaders, not at all concerned about having business people, journalists and entertainers sharing the education limelight.
When the initiative began, UNICEF had been paying 100% of the cost, but then ICICI and others started to invest. By 1996, UNICEF was covering only 20% with a goal to reduce further to a negligible amount while still having a stake in the movement. As it turned out, with a change in Field Office leadership in 1997, UNICEF cut all ties and all funding. Looking back it was paradoxically perhaps a positive move for UNICEF to remove its association, because that is when the movement really took off.
Now the Pratham Education Foundation, a nationwide organisation, produces one of the most influential pieces of research and advocacy in the Indian educational system: the Annual State of Education Report (ASER). And that’s not all. In 2005, Pratham was highly instrumental in a landmark ruling of the Supreme Court of India whereby, constitutionally, education became a fundamental right for every child.
Who could have foreseen that the visit of an American mayor could lead to the development of such a powerful movement for children’s rights? Of course, Pratham’s success comes down to the quality and energy of the individuals behind it, especially its national leadership. But it is also an example of that Jim Grant spirit, described by our late colleague, David P. Haxton, as “waking up every morning with one item on the agenda: to change the world by sundown”. Or as Kul Gautam once said: “UNICEF is the mosquito that moves the elephant.”
Read more about the Pratham at https://www.pratham.org/, and the Annual State of Education Report at http://www.asercentre.org.
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