Madhav Chavan is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pratham, one of the largest education NGOs in the world. It was founded to bring business, government, and civil society together to solve the problems of education in Mumbai in 1994-95. Over the years, Pratham has tried to work with governments, and when working this is not possible, Pratham works independently on a large scale with volunteers. Innovations that work on scale in unstructured environments are an important feature of Pratham. Madhav received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2011.
2012 SESSIONS
Dancing with Elephants: Influencing Education Systems in a World in Flux
Location: Lecture Theatre 4
Education is one of the sectors most impervious to change, as evidenced by continued reliance on outdated curricula, teaching methods and administrative processes. Yet helping today’s youth develop new ways of thinking and relevant skills has never been more urgently required, given complex and accelerating local and global challenges. Where are innovations in the education system coming from and how are creative entrepreneurs working in traditional educational institutions to mainstream these approaches?
Speakers: John Merris-Coots, Anjani Kumar Singh, Mary Anne Müller, Mike Marriner, Daniela Bertoglia, Debra Dunn, Madhav Chavan
2011 SESSIONS
2011 Skoll Awards For Social Entrepreneurship
The Skoll Foundation invites you to revisit the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship where we honour the 2011 Awardees and to celebrate all those who are working to create a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world.
2011 Awardees included Rebecca Onie of Health Leads, Madhav Chavan of Pratham, Ellen Moir of New Teacher Center and Ned Breslin of Water For People.
Featuring remarks by and the awarding of the Skoll Global Treasure Award to:
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond M. Tutu, Chair, The Elders
Musical performance by:
Peter Gabriel and Baaba Maal
Speakers: Archbishop Emeritus Desmond M. Tutu, Baaba Maal, Rebecca Onie, Madhav Chavan, Ellen Moir, Ned Breslin, Sally Osberg, Peter Gabriel, Jeff Skoll
2011 Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship Ceremony
From: 2011 Skoll Awards For Social Entrepreneurship | With: Jeff Skoll, Sally Osberg, Rebecca Onie, Ellen Moir, Ned Breslin, Madhav Chavan
Social entrepreneurs don't generally set out to incite protests or topple despots, but they are revolutionaries none the less. They understand that wars can be waged by a thousand cuts, that crimes against humanity occur when millions of children die of diarrhea or tetanus. When medicine fails the poor, when education squanders young educators and sacrifices its young.
And they refuse to accept that this is reality, the status quo, just the way things are, they know better and they set out to make it so. The 2011 Skoll Award winners we honor tonight offer scalable proven solutions to these toughest of problems, and to the unacceptable conditions of poverty and injustice that breed and sustain them.
Jeff, would you please join me on stage for our awards presentation? First up, Rebecca Onie. Health Leads. Rebecca Onie recognize the compounding effects of poverty on illness designed a protocol and set about to cure a sick system. With Doctor Barry Zuckerman and Boston Medical College, Rebbecca founded Health Leads to bridge the health gap between medicine and social work.
Health Leads expands the capacity of clinics and hospitals, to meet the underlying needs of poor patients. Doctors prescribes the support services along with medication and Health Leads volunteers connect patients to sources of food, housing, job training. In other words, to sources that can accelerate their healing and keep them healthy. Within 90 days the majority of patients served by Health Leads have secured at least One essential resource, an 83% of its volunteer graduates have gone onto jobs or advanced studying the fields whit health and poverty.
Rebecca Onie, Health Leads.
In October of 1985, I walked in to the waiting room of a chaotic busy urban clinic. The TV I distinctly remember play this endless reel of cartoons and the exhaustion of mother who had taken two three and some time four buses to bring their children in to the doctor was palpable. The doctors it seemed never really had time for all the patients.
And over the course of six months I would corner them, rather while they were scrawling notes in the medical records, or swallowing their lunches in the hallway. And I would say to them, "if you had unlimited resources what is the one thing you would give your patients"? And they said the same thing again and again and again.
A story we have now heard hundreds of times.
They said everyday we have
patients who come into the clinic, child has an infection and we give the family medicine, but the truth is, I know there's no food at home. The truth is, I know this family is living with thirteen other people in two bedrooms, and I don't even ask about those issues because there is nothing that I can do.
On those issues we practice a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy. And in fact, in that clinic it is true; the patients pile up in the waiting room, the doctors have just a few minutes, and they would say "I don't where to find food for the patients and I have no help in doing so." In that clinic there is one social worker for 24,000 patients.
This clinic, to be clear, is not in Lima, it is not in Nairobi, it is not in Bogota and it is not in Port au Prince. It is Boston, Massachusetts, in the shadow of Harvard Medical School - the epicenter of some of the fanciest and most expensive healthcare in the world. And indeed, in cities across the country, in Harlem, New York, Southeast Washington, D.C., the South-side of Chicago and other clinics throughout the country, this is the way healthcare is delivered.
And it shows. In the communities where Health Leads works - in Baltimore, Maryland - the life expectancy is lower than it is in Bangladesh. So let me be plain here. The impact of poverty on health is not developing world issue. It is not a developed world challenge. It is a challenge that is faced by poor people everywhere they live in the world.
Health Lead's response is simple. It is cheap, it is effective. We enable physicians to write prescriptions for basic resources like food, housing and heat, alongside prescriptions for medication. Patients then take those prescriptions to our desks in the clinic waiting room, where we have a core of 700 college volunteers who fill those prescriptions by connection patients out to the resources that they need.
Over the next 3 years Health Leads will create 25,000 successful resource connections for low income patients and their families. But our goal is not merely to serve more patients; the goal is to change the way that healthcare is delivered, so that doctors can prescribe solutions that improve health, just as they prescribe prescriptions that will enable families to manage disease.
This is our vision. And this is why the Skoll award is so important. Health Leads model is a distinctly non-innovative approach. The purpose of the award is to allow us to follow in the footsteps of and to learn from Paul Farmer, Vera Cordeiro, Gene Falk, Mitch Besser and so many others in this room who share our vision for the way that healthcare should be delivered everywhere across the globe.
What Health Leads has been able to show is that a poeple that a couple of volunteers in a clinic reading room, you empower physicians to ask the real question of their patients. And you create a next generation of front line health care Providers and leaders who really will change the health care system.
A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to talk to Amelie Lozada [sp],one of our alumi who is now in medical school student and spent 3 years as an undergraduate working in that same clinic at Boston medical center. She said, when my classmate write a prescription, they think their work is done. When I write a prescription I think can the family read the prescription?
Does the family have transportation to the pharmacy? Do they have money to pay for the prescription and do they have food to take with it? Those are not questions that I learned in medical school. Those are questions that I learned with Health Leads. Thank you.
Ellen Moir, New Teacher Center.
In the US one third of our new teachers, young men and women entering a noble profession with noble aspirations, don't make it.
The turnover rate saps education of its talent, and scars schools, classrooms and students. Even worse the problem hits the most vulnerable the hardest since new teachers are most commonly placed in the toughest school settings. Ellen Moir traces her passion for education to her high school Spanish teacher, who encouraged her to become the first one in her family to attend college.
For more than twenty years Ellen has tested and refined a model, to pair talented and experienced veteran teachers with talented and inexperienced new teachers. Launching New Teacher Center in 1998. In 2010, the center reached more than twenty six thousand teachers to affect 1.84 million students.
To bolster its impact the center place an active role in the national education policy debate advocating for state and federal policies that line up with the needs of educators and students.
Ellen
Moir, New Teacher Center.
My first year as a classroom teacher I felt like a complete failure. I wanted to quit. I'd never worked so hard in my life, and I knew in my heart, that I really wasn't making a difference in the lives of my students from the moment I left college, I knew I was going to be a phenomenal teacher. But when I met my students, I could see quickly that I didn't know what to do.
Maybe I chosen the wrong profession. Those are the words of new teachers across America. We have a horrible way of inducting them. It's really a trial by fire experience. One that you'd never want to have happen to anyone you know. Yes, we can find a key for them to the classroom, but the room is bare.
There's nothing for them to know, a guide on what to teach or how to teach, and their disproportionally assigned to the toughest schools within schools the toughest assignments. No wonder 50% leave within the first 3 to 5 years. And let me be clear, those that leave are leaving from the communities and from the students that needs stability and connectedness the most.
Its a tragedy, its despicable and it haunted me for years to watch this play out, as we simultaneously talked about building a profession. How could we ever really recruit the most talented to stay, and care and do their best, if we greet them with the conditions that we've done so far? At the New Teacher Center, we are driven to build a better profession, to really honor and value teachers.
Each of you remembers a teacher that made a difference in your life. I personally want to be sure that it's not left to chance that every underprivileged child in America, every Latino and African American child in this country, gets the best teachers. So we built a model to actually on board, or induct new teachers into the profession.
Where we not only wanted to help new teachers and their students, but we wanted to create optimism and hope in our profession by releasing the most talented of teachers to serve in the role of mentor. These exemplary teachers, they teach new teachers how to teach. That's their job. They are beside the new teachers every week of the year for two years.
So, if a new teacher has a problem and it's 8 PM at night, they can ping them and get an answer or they can simply pick up the phone. Let me tell you a moment about Viviana Espinosa. Viviana teaches in East Pola Alto, many of you have heard of Palo Alto, probably you live in the most affluent communities in America. But have you heard that East Palo Alto across the bridge resembles the South side of Chicago the Englewood community it's tough.
I remember when I went there the first time ten years ago. I couldnt believe that we called this is a school, and a district. Against all odds, Vivianna with her 20 first-graders, those 20 students of 17 were English language learners, Vivianna set out an aggressive course with her mentor, to help every single one of those students read at grade level by the end.
And am happy to tell you, that with this expert other at her side, Vivianna was able to do just that. Fifteen of the students met grade level, and all 20 of them had made growth beyond a year. I told you that story about Vivianna, because you can see that her students are really the primary beneficiaries of this work.
But I want you to know that Vivianna's mentor, and the other mentors we've reached across the country, 6,000 of them, for the first time in their careers feel empowered and proud to be teachers, and are very focused on how to build in this continuous improvement process, into the schools. We reached 1.5 million students, I'm proud of that but that's not enough.
With this Skoll Award we're going to double that number. We're going to reach 3,000,000 new students coming from communities where they are underserved and not getting the kind of quality education that America touts as being part of our democracy. Imagine if every single new teacher in America got this kind of induction, mentored support for two years, how the students could actually - the new teachers would be better faster and the students would actually improve, and the results will be fabulous.
And the new teachers would have a fire and a passion for being the best that they can. Imagine how we'd move on needle on performance, if we had this kind of a system. Let me just share with you the word of one of the mentee's that had a great mentor for two years. She said my mentor was like a light that guided me through my first years.
I was able to take that light and shine it on my students. My heartfelt thanks to the Skoll Foundation and to Jeff Skoll for this award. I accept it on behalf of every teacher in America, who is trying to be the best that they possibly can, and who care deeply about all students and know that all students can be successful.
This award is going to help the new Teacher Center shine that bright light on millions of students. Underprivileged students across the country, new teachers and their mentors, to transform education in America. This is our time join me in making this difference, thank you.
Madhav Chavan, Pratham.
Madhav Chavan found Pratham in 1993 to address India's educational crisis. 140 million of the countries children, 95% of whom are enrolled in primary schools can neither read nor perform mathematics at age of grade appropriate levels. Pratham's approach emphasis simple low cost solutions. It bases its programs in homes and temples.
It trains mothers and volunteers ti reinforce maths and reading instructions, and insist on rigorous assessment to ensure interventions succeed. At the height of its flagship, Read India campaign profit range 17% of India's children covering 21 states and one out of every two villages. Literacy levels improved dramatically, so much so that the campaign has transitioned to scale up it's results through partnership with state and local governments. Beyond its direct interventions and discipline self assessment, Protham created the annual status of education report.
The only measurement of children's literacy and numeracy conducted at scale in India today. Madhav and his senior staff serve on educational policy making bodies at state of central government levels, they innovate and test, implement and prove and then partner and serve,with government to transform public education for India's children.
Madhav Chavan, Pratham.
Thank you, Academy.
Always wanted to say that. And, there is an aspiring actor inside me, and it helps to know that Jeff Skoll is into movies as well. And I think the Skoll Awards are the Oscars of social enterprise, don't you think? Now, I have a problem, because most of the things that I want to, wanted to say as context to my speech, Sally has already said.
So, I can tell you some stories instead of some other thoughts. I know Ben is looking forward to those. You see there are 200,000,000 children in India - 210,000,000 are children. Sally has given you some statistics. 97% of those, and we verified that through humongous surveys, which we do every year - 97 percent are enrolled in school.
Most schools, more than 90 percent schools get midday meals. All children are given text book. Not always on time, but they get text books. All children are provided free uniforms, two sets. In many states now, the governments are giving, giving bicycles to young girls to go to school. So after all this and there are teachers as well, not enough always, but there are enough teachers.
So why is Pratham doing anything at all? And so when we went out and did this annual status of education report, and we do it every year, we found that 50 percent of the children can not read. My colleague Rukmini Banerji tells a story of a bunch of volunteers going into a village in the northern province of India, called Uttar Pradesh.
So its a village and the village head, patriarch is lying down on his charpai, char is four. so its a four legger. Cant call it a bed cant call it a cot. And he's smoking his hookah and when he sees the volunteers and what he was doing here? They say, sir we are here to do a survey. no no no education is all fine here, all children go to school. And his three sons are standing there. One is a third grader another fifth grader and seventh grader, well spaced. And so, so somebody says look there's a simple test here and the young kids starts looking and so they showed it to him and the third graders stumbles and he cant read. So the hookah comes out, and says, "Okay, give it to the other guy." So the fifth-grader starts reading very, very haultingly.
He can't read. Now the man is sitting up. The third guy, the seventh grader is saying, "I don't want to take this test." So he says get me my shirt, he is sitting bare chest. I want to check every house in this village what the heck is going on? So he goes out and checks and low and behold he finds that most children can't really read.
Now this actually of is a picture of India, which symbolizes what's going on. Parents think children go to school so they must be learning. Teachers think children come to school, I teach them so they must be learning. And the policy makers are happy with all that and say great. So when we do the survey village after village after village, its a wake up call. Policy is not that easy to change the establishment does not change that easily.
Evidence in my corners of the world is not always helpful. So we have to start telling people simplify, simplify the assessment, simplify the methods, so even the most ordinary people were capable of doing extraordinary things as we heared. They will get up and say I want to educate my child. Who's responsibility is it to educate our children?
Government, well it's easy to point fingers, but us you heard perhaps in a childhood when you point one finger at somebody, there three fingers pointing out yourself. Better do something about it. Look at it another way; if it was your child who could not read, would you blame the government? Advocacy? Would you go out and lobby or would you start teaching your child?
I think both are required. While you have to tell the government to do things you have to get up and start doing something by yourself. And I'm proud that I live in the country of Mahatma Gandhi, who said, get up and do it. Do it yourselves. So we, the Pratham volunteers people, go out and start talking.
Mahatma Gandhi walked 23 days, 300 kilometers and picked up salt against the British empire. What country is this now? Okay. Hundreds of thousands joined him, and history of India was changed. And now, you don't have to walk for 23 days, not 300 kilometers - just pick up a book, don't pick up salt, and read with a few children in your village.
Hundreds of thousands will join you, and the history of India will change once again. It's a very powerful message and that's how, by the thousands, volunteers come up. Now the problem is while these volunteers come, they are also victims of the same education system. They can't teach very well. They don't know math, they don't know reading properly, and so the Skoll Award is going to help us to build capacity of our own organization, so we can do things, not only on a large scale, but do them better.
We need to build leadership so that people can do things, on their own. I want to end by quoting Laozi, a great Chinese philosopher poet and it's one of my favorites. It is a guiding principle of how we try to do work, it's not always easy. Laoiz said, go to the people, live among them, love them, learn from them.
Start with what they know, build on what they have and when it is done, they will say "we did it ourselves." It's not about Pratham, it's not about you, it's not about Skoll. It's about people changing their own lives. We would like to enable them as best as we can.
Ned Breslin, Water for People.
Despite massive investments by the development community, the world is not on track to meet millenium development goals addressing sanitation and water quality. Globally, 884 million people lack access to clean water and 2.6 billion to sanitation. Working in Africa for sixteen years, Ned learned that solutions to sanitation and clean drinking water must be generated and sustained by communities.
Water for People puts stakeholders back in charge of their own water systems. Working with communities to design and build systems that provide full coverage, Water for People and sits on a standard as simple as it is powerful: To secure safe drinking water and sanitation for every clinic, school and home in every community.
It's newest technological tool, FLOW, uses mobile phones equipped with open-source software to document working and failed water points an innovation poised to become a standard assessment tool for the aid community. By 2014, Water for People aims for one hundred percent coverage and three up eleven countries and which it is already active, and it is committed to verifying the sustainability of the solutions 3, 6 and 10 years following their implementation.
Ned Breslin, Water for People.
Rain mixes with a distinct smell of burning charcoal, tall grass and maize stalks that scream, Africa, with every breath. The Rwandan mountains reach for the sky as thousands gather in the district of Rulindo to say we are going to eradicate water poverty in our district.
Everyone. We're going to get every school. We're going to get every clinic. We're going to get every household. Not this project over that project, not this community but not that one, not this school. But that one's too hard. We're not going to hide behind the facade of demand. That is used as a shield by NGOs worldwide to not hear the voices of the hardest to reach.
The poorest and most vulnerable. If you listen very carefully, everyone is demanding clean water. Forever. The mayor, Eustace, is the one who came up with this idea, and he now stands in the realm before, residents of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: rgba(245, 245, 188, 0.980469); ">Rulindo</span> and he says, "am in We succeed if everyone gets water. The government of Paul Kagame, is in.
Water for People can't help him to be in, and the residents of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: rgba(245, 245, 188, 0.980469); ">Rulindo</span> scream out and shout, filling the air with their roar, putting their money on a table, putting their energy behind this work, to say that everyone is going to be served. There are no beneficiaries here. These are active agents of change who want to spark a revolution.
We are so honored to be part of this process, but we know we can't do it alone. We feel a wind behind our back, and we now feel the fresh push, coming from the Skoll Foundation. We are going to push the frontiers of monitoring, and try to give voice to those people, not through the intermediary of some NGOs, speaking on behalf them.
But let's hear them. Let's hear that roar. Let's get behind it, everyone. It's powerful. We are going to take, we are going to try and do away with the 60 page reports that nobody reads, that is a justification for funding, that is a way to ask for more funding, but doesn't transform lives. We're going to try to harness the power of visual data, of music, of art to drive this movement forward, and as the crowd begins to disperse a little girl skips over to me.
She's ten years old. She's beautiful. She reaches out her hand and she says to me. What is your name? We chat. She's great and she skips away. And I know what success is. Success is that we start to hear her voice, that we know that she never has to go to a muddy puddle again to fetch dirty water, but can grow and thrive and be whoever she wants to be.
Success is when we take the energy and dynamics of places like <span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: rgba(245, 245, 188, 0.980469); ">Rulindo</span> and similar districts in Honduras and Guatemala and Bolivia and we don't just say hey this is a nice little pilot, this is really great and it's going to be a model in a sea of failure. But it starts to spread, starts to go over everyone's in. Why this district and not that district, we cant do it alone.
But we can try. Is it bold and ambitious? You bet. Can we do it, I've no idea, but I know we can do it, if we do it ourselves, and I know we can't do it, if we don't hear my friend's voice, so Water for People embrases this challenge on the part of many who are in this fight, join us. We are excited. We're going to find a way to tell this story.
We're going to hear the voices of people. And not only the people of Rwanda or Honduras, or India will hold us accountable. Everyone will hold us accountable. Thank you very much.
And they refuse to accept that this is reality, the status quo, just the way things are, they know better and they set out to make it so. The 2011 Skoll Award winners we honor tonight offer scalable proven solutions to these toughest of problems, and to the unacceptable conditions of poverty and injustice that breed and sustain them.
Jeff, would you please join me on stage for our awards presentation? First up, Rebecca Onie. Health Leads. Rebecca Onie recognize the compounding effects of poverty on illness designed a protocol and set about to cure a sick system. With Doctor Barry Zuckerman and Boston Medical College, Rebbecca founded Health Leads to bridge the health gap between medicine and social work.
Health Leads expands the capacity of clinics and hospitals, to meet the underlying needs of poor patients. Doctors prescribes the support services along with medication and Health Leads volunteers connect patients to sources of food, housing, job training. In other words, to sources that can accelerate their healing and keep them healthy. Within 90 days the majority of patients served by Health Leads have secured at least One essential resource, an 83% of its volunteer graduates have gone onto jobs or advanced studying the fields whit health and poverty.
Rebecca Onie, Health Leads.
In October of 1985, I walked in to the waiting room of a chaotic busy urban clinic. The TV I distinctly remember play this endless reel of cartoons and the exhaustion of mother who had taken two three and some time four buses to bring their children in to the doctor was palpable. The doctors it seemed never really had time for all the patients.
And over the course of six months I would corner them, rather while they were scrawling notes in the medical records, or swallowing their lunches in the hallway. And I would say to them, "if you had unlimited resources what is the one thing you would give your patients"? And they said the same thing again and again and again.
A story we have now heard hundreds of times.
They said everyday we have
patients who come into the clinic, child has an infection and we give the family medicine, but the truth is, I know there's no food at home. The truth is, I know this family is living with thirteen other people in two bedrooms, and I don't even ask about those issues because there is nothing that I can do.
On those issues we practice a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy. And in fact, in that clinic it is true; the patients pile up in the waiting room, the doctors have just a few minutes, and they would say "I don't where to find food for the patients and I have no help in doing so." In that clinic there is one social worker for 24,000 patients.
This clinic, to be clear, is not in Lima, it is not in Nairobi, it is not in Bogota and it is not in Port au Prince. It is Boston, Massachusetts, in the shadow of Harvard Medical School - the epicenter of some of the fanciest and most expensive healthcare in the world. And indeed, in cities across the country, in Harlem, New York, Southeast Washington, D.C., the South-side of Chicago and other clinics throughout the country, this is the way healthcare is delivered.
And it shows. In the communities where Health Leads works - in Baltimore, Maryland - the life expectancy is lower than it is in Bangladesh. So let me be plain here. The impact of poverty on health is not developing world issue. It is not a developed world challenge. It is a challenge that is faced by poor people everywhere they live in the world.
Health Lead's response is simple. It is cheap, it is effective. We enable physicians to write prescriptions for basic resources like food, housing and heat, alongside prescriptions for medication. Patients then take those prescriptions to our desks in the clinic waiting room, where we have a core of 700 college volunteers who fill those prescriptions by connection patients out to the resources that they need.
Over the next 3 years Health Leads will create 25,000 successful resource connections for low income patients and their families. But our goal is not merely to serve more patients; the goal is to change the way that healthcare is delivered, so that doctors can prescribe solutions that improve health, just as they prescribe prescriptions that will enable families to manage disease.
This is our vision. And this is why the Skoll award is so important. Health Leads model is a distinctly non-innovative approach. The purpose of the award is to allow us to follow in the footsteps of and to learn from Paul Farmer, Vera Cordeiro, Gene Falk, Mitch Besser and so many others in this room who share our vision for the way that healthcare should be delivered everywhere across the globe.
What Health Leads has been able to show is that a poeple that a couple of volunteers in a clinic reading room, you empower physicians to ask the real question of their patients. And you create a next generation of front line health care Providers and leaders who really will change the health care system.
A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to talk to Amelie Lozada [sp],one of our alumi who is now in medical school student and spent 3 years as an undergraduate working in that same clinic at Boston medical center. She said, when my classmate write a prescription, they think their work is done. When I write a prescription I think can the family read the prescription?
Does the family have transportation to the pharmacy? Do they have money to pay for the prescription and do they have food to take with it? Those are not questions that I learned in medical school. Those are questions that I learned with Health Leads. Thank you.
Ellen Moir, New Teacher Center.
In the US one third of our new teachers, young men and women entering a noble profession with noble aspirations, don't make it.
The turnover rate saps education of its talent, and scars schools, classrooms and students. Even worse the problem hits the most vulnerable the hardest since new teachers are most commonly placed in the toughest school settings. Ellen Moir traces her passion for education to her high school Spanish teacher, who encouraged her to become the first one in her family to attend college.
For more than twenty years Ellen has tested and refined a model, to pair talented and experienced veteran teachers with talented and inexperienced new teachers. Launching New Teacher Center in 1998. In 2010, the center reached more than twenty six thousand teachers to affect 1.84 million students.
To bolster its impact the center place an active role in the national education policy debate advocating for state and federal policies that line up with the needs of educators and students.
Ellen
Moir, New Teacher Center.
My first year as a classroom teacher I felt like a complete failure. I wanted to quit. I'd never worked so hard in my life, and I knew in my heart, that I really wasn't making a difference in the lives of my students from the moment I left college, I knew I was going to be a phenomenal teacher. But when I met my students, I could see quickly that I didn't know what to do.
Maybe I chosen the wrong profession. Those are the words of new teachers across America. We have a horrible way of inducting them. It's really a trial by fire experience. One that you'd never want to have happen to anyone you know. Yes, we can find a key for them to the classroom, but the room is bare.
There's nothing for them to know, a guide on what to teach or how to teach, and their disproportionally assigned to the toughest schools within schools the toughest assignments. No wonder 50% leave within the first 3 to 5 years. And let me be clear, those that leave are leaving from the communities and from the students that needs stability and connectedness the most.
Its a tragedy, its despicable and it haunted me for years to watch this play out, as we simultaneously talked about building a profession. How could we ever really recruit the most talented to stay, and care and do their best, if we greet them with the conditions that we've done so far? At the New Teacher Center, we are driven to build a better profession, to really honor and value teachers.
Each of you remembers a teacher that made a difference in your life. I personally want to be sure that it's not left to chance that every underprivileged child in America, every Latino and African American child in this country, gets the best teachers. So we built a model to actually on board, or induct new teachers into the profession.
Where we not only wanted to help new teachers and their students, but we wanted to create optimism and hope in our profession by releasing the most talented of teachers to serve in the role of mentor. These exemplary teachers, they teach new teachers how to teach. That's their job. They are beside the new teachers every week of the year for two years.
So, if a new teacher has a problem and it's 8 PM at night, they can ping them and get an answer or they can simply pick up the phone. Let me tell you a moment about Viviana Espinosa. Viviana teaches in East Pola Alto, many of you have heard of Palo Alto, probably you live in the most affluent communities in America. But have you heard that East Palo Alto across the bridge resembles the South side of Chicago the Englewood community it's tough.
I remember when I went there the first time ten years ago. I couldnt believe that we called this is a school, and a district. Against all odds, Vivianna with her 20 first-graders, those 20 students of 17 were English language learners, Vivianna set out an aggressive course with her mentor, to help every single one of those students read at grade level by the end.
And am happy to tell you, that with this expert other at her side, Vivianna was able to do just that. Fifteen of the students met grade level, and all 20 of them had made growth beyond a year. I told you that story about Vivianna, because you can see that her students are really the primary beneficiaries of this work.
But I want you to know that Vivianna's mentor, and the other mentors we've reached across the country, 6,000 of them, for the first time in their careers feel empowered and proud to be teachers, and are very focused on how to build in this continuous improvement process, into the schools. We reached 1.5 million students, I'm proud of that but that's not enough.
With this Skoll Award we're going to double that number. We're going to reach 3,000,000 new students coming from communities where they are underserved and not getting the kind of quality education that America touts as being part of our democracy. Imagine if every single new teacher in America got this kind of induction, mentored support for two years, how the students could actually - the new teachers would be better faster and the students would actually improve, and the results will be fabulous.
And the new teachers would have a fire and a passion for being the best that they can. Imagine how we'd move on needle on performance, if we had this kind of a system. Let me just share with you the word of one of the mentee's that had a great mentor for two years. She said my mentor was like a light that guided me through my first years.
I was able to take that light and shine it on my students. My heartfelt thanks to the Skoll Foundation and to Jeff Skoll for this award. I accept it on behalf of every teacher in America, who is trying to be the best that they possibly can, and who care deeply about all students and know that all students can be successful.
This award is going to help the new Teacher Center shine that bright light on millions of students. Underprivileged students across the country, new teachers and their mentors, to transform education in America. This is our time join me in making this difference, thank you.
Madhav Chavan, Pratham.
Madhav Chavan found Pratham in 1993 to address India's educational crisis. 140 million of the countries children, 95% of whom are enrolled in primary schools can neither read nor perform mathematics at age of grade appropriate levels. Pratham's approach emphasis simple low cost solutions. It bases its programs in homes and temples.
It trains mothers and volunteers ti reinforce maths and reading instructions, and insist on rigorous assessment to ensure interventions succeed. At the height of its flagship, Read India campaign profit range 17% of India's children covering 21 states and one out of every two villages. Literacy levels improved dramatically, so much so that the campaign has transitioned to scale up it's results through partnership with state and local governments. Beyond its direct interventions and discipline self assessment, Protham created the annual status of education report.
The only measurement of children's literacy and numeracy conducted at scale in India today. Madhav and his senior staff serve on educational policy making bodies at state of central government levels, they innovate and test, implement and prove and then partner and serve,with government to transform public education for India's children.
Madhav Chavan, Pratham.
Thank you, Academy.
Always wanted to say that. And, there is an aspiring actor inside me, and it helps to know that Jeff Skoll is into movies as well. And I think the Skoll Awards are the Oscars of social enterprise, don't you think? Now, I have a problem, because most of the things that I want to, wanted to say as context to my speech, Sally has already said.
So, I can tell you some stories instead of some other thoughts. I know Ben is looking forward to those. You see there are 200,000,000 children in India - 210,000,000 are children. Sally has given you some statistics. 97% of those, and we verified that through humongous surveys, which we do every year - 97 percent are enrolled in school.
Most schools, more than 90 percent schools get midday meals. All children are given text book. Not always on time, but they get text books. All children are provided free uniforms, two sets. In many states now, the governments are giving, giving bicycles to young girls to go to school. So after all this and there are teachers as well, not enough always, but there are enough teachers.
So why is Pratham doing anything at all? And so when we went out and did this annual status of education report, and we do it every year, we found that 50 percent of the children can not read. My colleague Rukmini Banerji tells a story of a bunch of volunteers going into a village in the northern province of India, called Uttar Pradesh.
So its a village and the village head, patriarch is lying down on his charpai, char is four. so its a four legger. Cant call it a bed cant call it a cot. And he's smoking his hookah and when he sees the volunteers and what he was doing here? They say, sir we are here to do a survey. no no no education is all fine here, all children go to school. And his three sons are standing there. One is a third grader another fifth grader and seventh grader, well spaced. And so, so somebody says look there's a simple test here and the young kids starts looking and so they showed it to him and the third graders stumbles and he cant read. So the hookah comes out, and says, "Okay, give it to the other guy." So the fifth-grader starts reading very, very haultingly.
He can't read. Now the man is sitting up. The third guy, the seventh grader is saying, "I don't want to take this test." So he says get me my shirt, he is sitting bare chest. I want to check every house in this village what the heck is going on? So he goes out and checks and low and behold he finds that most children can't really read.
Now this actually of is a picture of India, which symbolizes what's going on. Parents think children go to school so they must be learning. Teachers think children come to school, I teach them so they must be learning. And the policy makers are happy with all that and say great. So when we do the survey village after village after village, its a wake up call. Policy is not that easy to change the establishment does not change that easily.
Evidence in my corners of the world is not always helpful. So we have to start telling people simplify, simplify the assessment, simplify the methods, so even the most ordinary people were capable of doing extraordinary things as we heared. They will get up and say I want to educate my child. Who's responsibility is it to educate our children?
Government, well it's easy to point fingers, but us you heard perhaps in a childhood when you point one finger at somebody, there three fingers pointing out yourself. Better do something about it. Look at it another way; if it was your child who could not read, would you blame the government? Advocacy? Would you go out and lobby or would you start teaching your child?
I think both are required. While you have to tell the government to do things you have to get up and start doing something by yourself. And I'm proud that I live in the country of Mahatma Gandhi, who said, get up and do it. Do it yourselves. So we, the Pratham volunteers people, go out and start talking.
Mahatma Gandhi walked 23 days, 300 kilometers and picked up salt against the British empire. What country is this now? Okay. Hundreds of thousands joined him, and history of India was changed. And now, you don't have to walk for 23 days, not 300 kilometers - just pick up a book, don't pick up salt, and read with a few children in your village.
Hundreds of thousands will join you, and the history of India will change once again. It's a very powerful message and that's how, by the thousands, volunteers come up. Now the problem is while these volunteers come, they are also victims of the same education system. They can't teach very well. They don't know math, they don't know reading properly, and so the Skoll Award is going to help us to build capacity of our own organization, so we can do things, not only on a large scale, but do them better.
We need to build leadership so that people can do things, on their own. I want to end by quoting Laozi, a great Chinese philosopher poet and it's one of my favorites. It is a guiding principle of how we try to do work, it's not always easy. Laoiz said, go to the people, live among them, love them, learn from them.
Start with what they know, build on what they have and when it is done, they will say "we did it ourselves." It's not about Pratham, it's not about you, it's not about Skoll. It's about people changing their own lives. We would like to enable them as best as we can.
Ned Breslin, Water for People.
Despite massive investments by the development community, the world is not on track to meet millenium development goals addressing sanitation and water quality. Globally, 884 million people lack access to clean water and 2.6 billion to sanitation. Working in Africa for sixteen years, Ned learned that solutions to sanitation and clean drinking water must be generated and sustained by communities.
Water for People puts stakeholders back in charge of their own water systems. Working with communities to design and build systems that provide full coverage, Water for People and sits on a standard as simple as it is powerful: To secure safe drinking water and sanitation for every clinic, school and home in every community.
It's newest technological tool, FLOW, uses mobile phones equipped with open-source software to document working and failed water points an innovation poised to become a standard assessment tool for the aid community. By 2014, Water for People aims for one hundred percent coverage and three up eleven countries and which it is already active, and it is committed to verifying the sustainability of the solutions 3, 6 and 10 years following their implementation.
Ned Breslin, Water for People.
Rain mixes with a distinct smell of burning charcoal, tall grass and maize stalks that scream, Africa, with every breath. The Rwandan mountains reach for the sky as thousands gather in the district of Rulindo to say we are going to eradicate water poverty in our district.
Everyone. We're going to get every school. We're going to get every clinic. We're going to get every household. Not this project over that project, not this community but not that one, not this school. But that one's too hard. We're not going to hide behind the facade of demand. That is used as a shield by NGOs worldwide to not hear the voices of the hardest to reach.
The poorest and most vulnerable. If you listen very carefully, everyone is demanding clean water. Forever. The mayor, Eustace, is the one who came up with this idea, and he now stands in the realm before, residents of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: rgba(245, 245, 188, 0.980469); ">Rulindo</span> and he says, "am in We succeed if everyone gets water. The government of Paul Kagame, is in.
Water for People can't help him to be in, and the residents of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: rgba(245, 245, 188, 0.980469); ">Rulindo</span> scream out and shout, filling the air with their roar, putting their money on a table, putting their energy behind this work, to say that everyone is going to be served. There are no beneficiaries here. These are active agents of change who want to spark a revolution.
We are so honored to be part of this process, but we know we can't do it alone. We feel a wind behind our back, and we now feel the fresh push, coming from the Skoll Foundation. We are going to push the frontiers of monitoring, and try to give voice to those people, not through the intermediary of some NGOs, speaking on behalf them.
But let's hear them. Let's hear that roar. Let's get behind it, everyone. It's powerful. We are going to take, we are going to try and do away with the 60 page reports that nobody reads, that is a justification for funding, that is a way to ask for more funding, but doesn't transform lives. We're going to try to harness the power of visual data, of music, of art to drive this movement forward, and as the crowd begins to disperse a little girl skips over to me.
She's ten years old. She's beautiful. She reaches out her hand and she says to me. What is your name? We chat. She's great and she skips away. And I know what success is. Success is that we start to hear her voice, that we know that she never has to go to a muddy puddle again to fetch dirty water, but can grow and thrive and be whoever she wants to be.
Success is when we take the energy and dynamics of places like <span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: rgba(245, 245, 188, 0.980469); ">Rulindo</span> and similar districts in Honduras and Guatemala and Bolivia and we don't just say hey this is a nice little pilot, this is really great and it's going to be a model in a sea of failure. But it starts to spread, starts to go over everyone's in. Why this district and not that district, we cant do it alone.
But we can try. Is it bold and ambitious? You bet. Can we do it, I've no idea, but I know we can do it, if we do it ourselves, and I know we can't do it, if we don't hear my friend's voice, so Water for People embrases this challenge on the part of many who are in this fight, join us. We are excited. We're going to find a way to tell this story.
We're going to hear the voices of people. And not only the people of Rwanda or Honduras, or India will hold us accountable. Everyone will hold us accountable. Thank you very much.
