Google.org Provides $3 Mn In Grant For Elearning And Teachers App In India

Google.org, as part of its commitment to provide quality education in India through elearning, has given a grant of $3 Mn to non-profit organisations in India. As shared by the company in the latest blog post, this includes a $1 Mn grant to TheTeacherApp and a $2 Mn Google.org grant and technical assistance from the YouTube Learning team to the Central Square Foundation.

With this grant, The Teachers App will look forward to reach over 500K teachers in two years while Central Square Foundation will expand education and learning video content.

“Their success gives us the confidence to expand our efforts in India and today we are announcing additional grants totaling $3 Mn to support teacher learning and educational content creation,” Nick Cain, Education Lead of Google.org said in a blog.

Founded by Vinod Karate in 2016, TheTeacherApp is a non-profit Delhi-based organisation that provides digital learning on core concepts in math, language, pedagogy, science through short and interactive offline videos.

“We’re supporting TheTeacherApp to enable a connected experience on the topics that matter most to teachers and to develop additional video content in core concepts of math, science, language and pedagogy for their use in their classrooms,” detailed the blog post.

On the other hand, Delhi-based Central Square Foundation was established in 2012 by Ashish Dhawan. The startup is a venture philanthropy fund and policy think tank focused on improving the quality of school education for children from low-income communities in India.

“The grant will support a minimum of 20 content creators to produce at least 200 hours of quality science, technology, engineering and math content in Hindi and vernacular languages,” added the blog post.

As per the annual ASER 2017 report, over 86% of youth in the 14-18 age group joined formal education system. However, about 25% of this age group still cannot read basic text fluently in their own language and more than half struggle to solve simple math such as division, it added. Further, the data available from the Ministry of Human Resource Development reveals that there are 11 Lakh teachers currently teaching in schools that are not properly trained. Also, there are around 1.3 Lakh single teacher schools in India, says the World Bank report.

With the latest grant,  Google.org has now taken its total fund dispersed in India to $11.4 Mn. The move is part of Google’s $50 Mn global commitment to support nonprofits that are building technology to provide access to quality education.

Last year, the organisation gave grants worth $8.4 Mn to four NGOs – Learning Equality, Million Sparks Foundation, Pratham Books StoryWeaver and Pratham Education Foundation – which are focussed on providing access to quality learning platforms for both students and teachers. Of which, the grantees have reached more than 800,000 students and teachers with their tools and programmes across India.

As per Google, KPMG report, the online education in India is expected to witness 8x growth in the next five years. The edtech market has a tremendous potential to touch $1.96 Bn by 2021 from where it stands now i.e. $247 Mn. However, so far online learning is majorly accessible to the urban population. With organisations like Google.org supporting the elearning drive of the country, it is expected to bring the technology at the root level to the lesser privileged communities in India as well.