GKF partners with and gives grants to many organizations that operate in India and address the high-priority issue of child welfare (food,  health and education).  These organizations fall in the category of either small organizations (typically centered around the founder, who is very passionate about bringing about local change but is limited in scale) or large organizations (which have large scale but where the employees are less passionate about the cause). The unique thing about Ekal is that though it operates on very large scale, the employees and management seem very passionate about what they do. It is not just a job for them, but they believe in the cause. Most of the management seem to have first hand experience visiting the children in remote areas and seeing how Ekal's efforts are helping improve their lives. It is because of this dedication and commitment of Ekal volunteers and staff that we at GKF felt comfortable funding their projects, and have been doing so since 2013.

 

 

From 2013-2017, GKF primarily provided support to Ekal to run their schools. In 2018, we also funded Ekal's experimental rollout of e-shiksha in a few schools. E-shiksha uses tablets for teaching and it was our belief that this was the right step in making the teaching and learning process more efficient and bringing the kids in these rural areas up to speed on technology. The use of tablets enables the lesson apps to be developed at some central  location and then simultaneously downloaded onto all the tablets making distribution very efficient and ensuring that lessons are uptodate. The multi-modal capability of the tablets also makes the lessons more interesting to kids of all ages and enhances their learning experience. So it is a win-win for the teacher and the student. The risk back in 2018 was that changing any established procedure is always a challenge, however, the Ekal e-shiksha experiment seems to have worked out very well, consequently, we are continuing our support for it.

 

 

Ekal has a great opportunity to improve the average level of education of future generations of Indians - the more kids they are able to reach and educate, the better the quality of the future workforce, and the more relevant India becomes  on the global stage.