Vipla Foundation (www.viplafoundation.org) founded in 1988, is committed to preventing exploitation and discrimination of vulnerable women and children, empowering them to lead dignified and independent lives. Their work includes training community women to become Balwadi teachers, improving early childhood education quality, and collaborating with government departments to combat human trafficking.
Over the past 33 years, they have impacted over 100,000 preschool children, trained 800+ Balwadi teachers, rehabilitated trafficking survivors, and facilitated repatriation efforts for both Indian and foreign nationals, among other key achievements.
Bringing digital transformation to support the existing robust process of the Balwadi program making it easier to scale
Benefits of the app
- The implementation of the Umang Balwadi app ensures efficient data entry, time management and program ownership. Improves mentors' ability to provide timely guidance and performance monitoring.
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This results in improved program outcomes
- 91% Teachers used app regularly
- 31% increase in Student attendance
- 10% increase in Continuous Learning Evaluation scores
- 89% of students now school-ready
- 10% teachers showed improvement in Baseline to Endline score
- 19% teachers showed improvement in Quality Evaluation Assessment Tool
Vipla Foundation recognizes that early education and a nurturing environment are crucial for children to reach their full potential. Their Balwadi program is designed to bridge the learning gap by training community women to become Balwadi teachers, creating an enriching environment for children. To support these teachers, the Vipla Foundation has established a network of mentors who monitor and provide comprehensive support.
To ensure the holistic development of preschool children and promote ownership, effective decision-making, and accountability among teachers and mentors, it was essential to streamline data collection, tracking, and analysis.
Koita Foundation partnered with Vipla Foundation to automate these processes through the Umang Balwadi app. This transformative solution has significantly improved operational efficiencies, reduced paperwork, and streamlined the entire program. With seamless data collection and analysis capabilities, Vipla Foundation can now monitor programs more effectively and make timely, data-driven decisions. This innovative tool also paves the way for future scalability, facilitating the expansion of Balwadi teacher training programs across diverse regions.
- Balwadi teachers conduct door-to-door surveys using pen and paper, facing challenges with incomplete or lost data that hinder future outreach efforts. The registration process is cumbersome, requiring redundant manual entries into school registers and Excel sheets, exacerbating data management issues.
- The Umang Balwadi app allows teachers to capture data seamlessly on their Android devices, ensuring accurate and comprehensive data collection while reducing paperwork. Teachers can categorize students as mainstream or dropouts,
- The Umang Balwadi app streamlines data capture, enhances program efficiency, and provides valuable insights for optimizing Balwadi operations.
- Ensuring regular attendance and improving student performance are critical KPIs in Balwadi program management. However, manual tracking causes inefficiencies and delays in obtaining timely insights for corrective actions.
- Teachers now use the app to track student attendance, review records for the past five days, and identify patterns. Monthly student evaluations enable real-time performance assessment.
- This enables immediate insights into student progress, empowering teachers to make prompt, data-driven decisions and continuously improve the Balwadi program.
- Manually managing and sharing student performance data with parents was inefficient and slow. Tracking and scheduling parent-teacher meetings was difficult and usually unrecorded.
- The app enables teachers to send student report cards directly to parents via WhatsApp and log details of parent-teacher meetings.
- This improves parent-teacher communication, ensures parents are promptly informed about their child's progress, and enhances engagement in the child's education.
- Mentors spend their fieldwork time entering balwadi data into Excel, delaying analysis and support. Inefficient evaluations processes make curriculum adherence and monitoring teacher performance at Balwadi challenging.
- The automates the data collection and streamlines processes for real-time tracking of evaluations, attendance and curriculum adherence.
- This enhances efficiency and provides timely support for teachers at Balwadi.
At Vipla Foundation, we have always believed in the power of partnerships to push boundaries and build sustainable, scalable impact. With the unwavering support of the Koita Foundation, two of our most meaningful initiatives, the Umang App and the Saksham Portal, have grown into powerful examples of how technology can transform service delivery and education on the ground.
Our flagship Early Childhood Education programme, which started with community balwadis in 1988, has embraced the future with the Umang App. Designed in close collaboration with the Koita Foundation, this intuitive app empowers our teachers, many of whom have been with us for decades, to track, reflect, and improve classroom outcomes in real-time. Today, Umang is not only used by our own educators but also by over 1,000 BMC teachers we train.
The results speak for themselves. School readiness among pre-primary children in our Community, Balwadis, has risen from 86% in 2023 to 95% in 2025, demonstrating how thoughtfully integrated technology can strengthen outcomes without losing the human connection at the heart of education.
Simultaneously, the Saksham Portal now institutionalised across 42 women's shelter homes in 26 districts of Maharashtra, stands as a testament to how data-driven systems can improve rehabilitation outcomes for women survivors of violence. This would not have been possible without the Koita Foundation's commitment to co-create and scale the vision alongside us.
Koita Foundation has not only supported us in building tools but has also walked every step of the path with us, enabling our teams to grow in confidence and competence. Together, we've learned that when technology is positioned as a collaborator, not a competitor, it becomes the most significant gift to those working at the frontlines.
Pramod Nigudkar,
CEO, Vipla Foundation