In the heart of rural India, a young girl named Anushka once dreamed of a life beyond her small village. However, the journey to the present was not easy for Anushka. Her family, struggling to make ends meet, could scarcely afford to prioritize education. Anushka’s father, a farmer, and her mother, tirelessly managed their household of six.

The youngest of four siblings, Anushka, juggled school with household chores and work in the fields to lend a helping hand to her father. Amidst the family responsibilities, she quietly nurtured her love for learning. In 2018, Anushka’s learning journey took a leap forward with her introduction to P&G Shiksha’s digital remedial learning program, implemented in partnership with state governments and Educational Initiatives. Despite the challenges — long commutes, scarce resources, and household duties —Mindspark offered her something that had once seemed distant: the opportunity to excel. Mathematics and Science quickly became her favorite subjects. In fact, in one of the exams, she ranked among the top performers in her district, surpassing not just her peers in the village, but also students from more privileged backgrounds in the neighbouring areas.

Twenty years ago, when “Shiksha” was merely a word for education, P&G India envisioned a future where every child, regardless of their background, would have access to quality education. In 2005, long before CSR laws were introduced, P&G Shiksha began its journey, marking the beginning of a transformative journey. It started as a simple solution to a complex problem: the lack of quality education infrastructure in underserved areas. P&G Shiksha began with a single-minded focus on education, by building school infrastructure, providing children with the physical spaces to learn. What began as an infrastructure-centric initiative grew into a comprehensive, 360-degree approach to education, aiming to strengthen physical infrastructure to make it learning conducive and improving foundational literacy and numeracy via prevention and remediation of learning gaps, to ensure that every child learns with conceptual understanding at their grade level. 

As P&G India celebrates 20 years of P&G Shiksha, the program continues to be committed to a single-minded focus on education with over 50 lakh children being impacted. From building schools to empowering teachers, encouraging community learning, and providing digital remedial tools, P&G Shiksha is equipping lakhs of children with the gift of education Today, this program is not just about infrastructure; it’s about unlocking the potential of every child, ensuring they learn with conceptual understanding to succeed.

The Learning Crisis: A Call to Action

The National Achievement Survey of 2021 found nearly half of primary school students (6+ crore) to have learning levels lower than appropriate for their grades. This gap between current and expected grade learning levels is referred to as ‘learning gap’.   A significant portion of teenagers, around 25%, cannot read a simple paragraph fluently in their own language. The situation is further compounded by the fact that more than half of these young people struggle with basic arithmetic, a skill typically expected of much younger children. This has led to a new challenge in the learning landscape, where access to education has drastically improved, but learning outcomes have not. The gap significantly impacts children who perpetually keep trying to cope, and often face mockery or ridicule owing to lack of awareness regarding learning gaps.

Moreover, if you notice, according to the New Education Policy 2020, the top priority for the education system is to ensure all children achieve foundational literacy and numeracy in primary school by 2025. However, what about those students who have already moved beyond primary school without developing these essential skills? Can they effectively join the workforce without this foundation? Addressing this pressing challenge in a comprehensive and timely way is crucial for their future success.

Education is a lifeline – The ripple effect that it creates across families and societies

The gaps highlighted above represent more than just academic challenges; they are barriers to future opportunities in our rapidly evolving, skill-based economy. When these barriers are broken down, the impact is profound and far-reaching. First-generation learners become beacons of hope, inspiring their siblings and peers to dream bigger. Parents, witnessing their children’s progress, become more invested in education, creating a virtuous cycle of learning and growth. This transformation ripples through families, lifting economic prospects and breaking intergenerational cycles of limited opportunity. In communities where such interventions take place, a rising tide of aspirations is evident. From young girls pursuing STEM careers to children from remote villages accessing digital learning tools, each success story becomes a catalyst for broader social change, demonstrating how quality education truly serves as a lifeline for building a more capable, equitable society.

Nurturing Potential – A Holistic Educational Approach through the Power of Partnerships

In a world that is rapidly evolving, the gaps in foundational learning are an urgent challenge that cannot be ignored. As children across the country face barriers to mastering basic literacy and numeracy, the future of their education—and ultimately, their opportunities—hangs in the balance. The impact of these learning gaps is far-reaching, affecting not only academic growth but also the ability to navigate an increasingly skill-driven world. Addressing these gaps requires a comprehensive, multi-faceted approach that goes beyond traditional methods. It demands innovation, collaboration, and a deep understanding of the challenges students face. 

The three-pronged approach by P&G Shiksha includes: Prevention of learning gaps, Remediation of learning gaps, and Ensuring Learning Continuity.

• PREVENTION: via Early Childhood Education: During early childhood when brain development is at its highest point, nurturing appropriate developmental skills has been closely linked with positive outcomes in the holistic growth of a child. To enable this, P&G Shiksha partners with Pratham Education Foundation for its Early Childhood Education program dedicated to children aged 3-6 years. This program focuses on developing motor, cognitive, social emotional, language and creative skills in children, thereby setting them up for a strong start for their education journey. By leveraging various models partnering with states, ranging from in-school, Anganwadi-led, and a unique, first-of-its-kind model involving mothers as volunteers, the program leverages activity-based pedagogy. 

• PREVENTION via enhancing Learning Environment: In line with the belief that strong infrastructural support at schools can help make the environment around children more conducive to learning and eliminate distractions, P&G Shiksha, together with its partners at Round Table India, undertakes educational infrastructure interventions like building classrooms. This helps improve the learning environment for children and teachers, and the impact is seen in increasing enrolments, better attendance, reducing dropouts, driving lesson efficiency for teachers, encouraging students, and therefore, overall higher learning level. 

• REMEDIATION: via Community Learning: A unique community based and an ‘in-school’ model, in partnership with Pratham Education Foundation, comes to live with the support of trained volunteers from the community and schoolteachers. Here, we follow the ‘Teaching at the Right Level’ approach, where children in Grades 3 to 5 are grouped according to their learning levels rather than grade, and level-specific activity-based learning is delivered to help strengthen skills in foundational subjects of language and mathematics (in line with NEP). 

• REMEDIATION: via Digital Remedial Learning: We are leveraging technology to bridge learning gaps, partnering with Educational Initiatives. We partner with state governments to set up digital labs, where P&G and EI implement ‘Mindspark’, a computer-based adaptive learning tool that leverages AI and ML to integrate pedagogy, teacher instruction and a learning management system to assess a student’s learning level and develop a customized learning path for each one of them. Gamified learning helps encourage students to keep learning in the privacy of their screen, removing barriers like mockery, lack of motivation and negative spotlight. Multi-device tool access ensures continued learning at home and during breaks. Through this initiative, we are also impacting over 20,000 children from Tribal communities of Maharashtra and Telangana, in partnership with the state government departments. 

• ENSURING LEARNING CONTINUITY: via P&G Shiksha Betiyan Scholarship – a unique program that offers financial assistance and mentorship to underserved girls pursuing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education, in partnership with Centre for Civil society. The program aims to support entry of skilled women professionals into manufacturing and production industries, by ensuring learning continuity for them.

In last fiscal year alone, the children who are part of P&G Shiksha’s programs focused on improving learning outcomes achieved remarkable progress in performances. 

• Early Childhood Education
  • 84% children reached age-appropriate developmental skills vs 50% at baseline during the year. 
• Digital remedial learning
  • 70% students progressed in learning levels 
• Community remedial learning
  • 80% children in grade 3-5 could now subtract vs 37% at baseline

P&G Shiksha’s efforts are aligned with the National Education Policy, focusing on foundational literacy and numeracy, to ensure that every child learns with conceptual understanding.

Further, strong collaborations and partnerships are key to the success of any community program. In line with this belief, P&G Shiksha partners with various government bodies, reputed NGOs and local communities, which help create a scalable and sustained impact. This fuels a lasting change and acts as a catalyst in achieving sustained positive educational outcomes.

What Lies Ahead? A Future Fueled by Education

Looking toward the future, the vision for education in India remains centred on progress, opportunity, and hope, in alignment with the Government’s Samagra Shiksha Abhiyaan and the New Education Policy’s guiding principle to “Educate, Encourage, Enlighten.” Even amidst the challenges of the pandemic, when school closures disrupted learning, initiatives like P&G Shiksha leveraged innovative solutions such as household items and digital platforms to ensure continued education for children across the country. Moving forward, the commitment to addressing learning gaps and empowering every child to realize their full potential remains stronger than ever. 

Across India, countless stories of transformation are being written, from rural communities to urban spaces, where children are not just learning but thriving. The power of education ripples far beyond the classroom, creating lasting change in families, communities, and generations, and lighting the way for a more equitable and brighter tomorrow.