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.
Our Early Childhood Education programme has steadily built itself into a robust and efficient model over the past few years - this is our flagship programme, first started by our late Founder, Vipula Kadri in 1988. So we knew we wanted to grow it.
Many of our teachers and mentors have been several years at Vipla Foundation and have been strong, traditional educators. While our M&E tools have evolved and been tested over time, engaging with technology has always been a thing of reluctance.
Koita Foundation worked with our team over multiple iterations to demonstrate, develop and tweak as required an intuitive application, Umang, which gives each teacher a way to quickly input information and then the possibility of seeing how her class is doing at the click of a phone button! Imagine her excitement when she can see her group doing well, and imagine her determination when she identifies areas that she has to innovate in to improve her students' skills! This is what the platform and the app offer the programme and it's frontline workers.
Today the platform is being used with our oldest programme - the first set of teachers that were engaged all of 33 years ago. They are adopting, learning and responding. As they grow, so do we.
It is this growing together that Umang and the Koita Foundation have enabled. It is the biggest gift they could give us - to illustrate how technology is a collaborator and enabler in the teaching process, not a competitor.
Havovi Wadia
CEO, Vipla Foundation