PD1 | How We Offer Free, High-Quality Rural Education | Lakshmi Ramamurthy, Amyga Foundation | India, Pre-School Education

Discover the inspiring journey of Mrs. Lakshmi Ramamurthy, founder of Amyga Academy, as she revolutionizes education in rural areas through a unique government partnership model. In this episode, we uncover the incredible story of Amyga’s mission to bring free education to rural areas in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu through a groundbreaking partnership with the government. Dive deep into the challenges, triumphs, and life-changing impact of empowering children and women in these communities. Get ready to be inspired by the transformative power of education. Tune in now!

Discussion Topics: How We Offer Free, High-Quality Rural Education

• The UNICEF India study report that began it all
• The reason Amyga chose to go Rural
• The operating model
• Managing the quality of education
• Teacher comfort and retention
• Challenges hiring and onboarding teachers from rural families
• How parents view education
• Build a mutually beneficial Government partnership
• Addressing infrastructure where it is lacking 
• Making school fun
• Choosing to partner vs going it alone

Transcript: How We Offer Free, High-Quality Rural Education

Mridula: Hi, welcome to Pre School Diaries podcast series on education entrepreneurs. For this series, we are going to be interviewing some very exciting entrepreneurs who had some amazing journeys in early education. We’ve set up on some very exciting journeys to set up and establish their own preschools.

Today we bring to you one such very exciting entrepreneur. Mrs. Lakshmi Ramamurthy, who’s the founder of Amyga Academy. Amyga has a very unique and interesting model. They bring free education to schools in rural areas across parts of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, and they interestingly partner with the government in one such, in a very unique way to ensure that children in tribal areas children in places where there is no access to no quality education, actually get access to activity based learning. 

We at Kreedo have been very excited to partner with them and you. In this episode, we hope to discover more exciting tidbits about some of the stories that they have, both from a perspective of learning as well as the massive women workforce that they employ. Just want to give us a quick brief about how and why did you really embark on this journey and how did it begin for you?

Lakshmi: Sure. So, thank you, Mridula, at the outset to you and the Kreedo team for it’s an honour to be part of the, to be invited to the first episode of your series. So after about 15 to 17 years in the corporate world. I said enough is enough. And what sort of inspired us to get into this space was a UNICEF India study report that spoke about how important early childhood education is.

Which I was not aware of when my own children went through that phase, by the way. It was quite fascinating that study report. And it also spoke about how much of a gap there is in India in this space, right? And how important it is not just for academic development, but the overall personality development of the child that actually takes the child well into his or her adulthood.

So that’s what inspired me to get into early childhood education in the first place. And then the choice was between urban and rural India. We said definitely rural because urban India for sure has a lot of opportunities. And even if you look at whether it is commercial schools or NGOs, It’s much easier to work in cities, right?

Because most of us who are educated and who are more privileged life in the cities, they’re just simpler, which makes it simpler. We said, no, we won’t do that. We’ll actually take this to where it’s needed the most and where it’s not available, and that’s the gap that we are trying to fill. So that’s how it all began.

By the way, so we, we began with about eight children and two teachers. And as you said, today we are a team of about 40 teachers handling 250 children in 20 centers across Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

Mridula: That’s amazing. And I know that you picked Krishnagiri, I would say, as one of your first zones, which was where I think we had not seen much access to any kind of education of, let alone quality education, just education by any standards.

So would you like to tell us a little about the kind of children that come to school, a little bit about the families? How was the experience of actually taking something like this there? 

Lakshmi: Sure. So we don’t run our own centers. So what we do is we collaborate with the government, the state government, women and child development department, and we offer free education, and English medium in rural Anganwadi centers.

So we have to take the education because the space is there, and children are already there, waiting to be guided. We deploy the material and the learning materials, and we hire and train rural women. Yeah, so in both Montessori, and we train them in spoken English. That’s been very challenging. And for that, we work with a team of very committed volunteers retired school principals, English teachers, professors for people who are just good at English and who are homemakers or people who are pursuing a career and want to do this extra for all kinds of people, mostly women, but there are also men from various parts of India because all of this is done on the phone.

And this has been going on for the last four or five years. Very well. Our volunteers have stuck with us for the last four or five years. The biggest challenge that I see in rural private schools is lack of investment in the teachers, because unless we train our teachers, the children are not going to get what we want them to get, right?

So that’s one thing we decided that will be a big differentiator. We will keep investing in our teachers. This is not just a one week training or a one month training, and get done. It is constant refresher training, both in English and the pedagogy and the process. Because once you let it loose, it just goes, so quality gets diluted.

So that’s something we do. So this is the model, and these rural women are sent to these anganwadi centres. We pay the salary, obviously, of these rural women. And so this is how it works. Like you said, we’ve actually chosen remote villages. The remote is better, what we do is to, that’s a challenge because not many buses go there.

So this year we launched the leash of this scheme wherein we got our teachers electric scooters.

Mridula: Oh, lovely. 

Lakshmi: The model is that they pay the down payment so that there’s some stake. That they have in it. And then the monthly emi is paid for by the organisation in addition to their salary for as long as they work with the organisation. So a bit of the retention strategy as well.

Mridula: Absolutely. And that’s brilliant. It’s not just departing to go faster. It’s I think also responsibility and enhancing their self-worth and helping them become far more independent and confident in just as simple as I.

Lakshmi: Definitely. So when we started, like you said, Amyga was about empowering children through education.

Now we are empowering these roles, women as well. Create enhancing livelihood and all of that. Many of our teachers have come and told us, this is a dream come true. I never imagined that I would have a scooter in my name. And then the other thing is we also encourage them to follow the law.

So we tell them that if you want the emi, then you have to have a valid licence. You have to have insurance. You wear a helmet. We are also driving some compliant behaviour.

Mridula: Any interesting stories that you would like to share with us about? About a teacher or a child or, or the kinda.

Lakshmi: Sure, sure. So in fact, it has a connection with the Kreedo. Recruitment itself was a challenge. I don’t know. The first thing about Krishnagiri so what do you do? So I had a manager and then he suggested we put up posters on trees and things like that. And somehow this girl contacted me and so I said, you’d love to travel to Bangalore for a one week training program.

And she said, yes. And the day before your BLT started, I got a call from her saying, no. My father-in-law is saying no. So I had to speak for 90 minutes to her father-in-law to actually convince him to send her to Bangalore. And I’ll tell you, my daughter has lived outside the city. I’m not half as worried about her safety as I was, because it was a huge responsibility, right?

And I taught her that she had to keep locking the hotel room door. And every morning I would give her a message saying, are you fine? You okay? The night before, did you go back? I made sure she was right next door so she didn’t have to cross the road. Yeah. But yeah, it was very different from the corporate world and international travel.

I was new to entrepreneurship, to education, and to rural India. It was quite a lot of very easily that you actually start through all that with a kind of these are the kind of challenges that people don’t even imagine having, that you have to convince the family too, have people travel.

Sometimes even convince families to send children to school. Absolutely. Which itself is like a whole war by itself. And when we recruit, we even talk to the mother-in-law, if not for anything else, just to massage her ego. Like we are, respecting your opinion. Are you okay with your daughter-in-law? Because at the end of the day, we are doing it for women, so you have to make it work for them, right? So whatever works. 

I think sometimes when you work in the court report, you forget that there are still very large parts of India. I would say still 75% of India, or 80% of India, where education or jobs are not a one-on-one relationship.

It’s one. It’s with the whole family. Whole family. The family needs to give their acceptance for a teacher to go to work. Even in a regular school. The family has to agree with that. And yeah, it’s a lot of extended family. It’s not just family. Some, sometimes we have difficulties like, say, My brother-in-law did not allow me to buy it to, so it’s approval has to come from 10 people, from 10 different people and just and to a, sadly, still to a small extent even the girl child coming to school sometimes needs approval, which is really a sad state of affairs to see still.

Mridula: So anything that you’d like to share, Lakshmi, in terms of your experience in early education itself, what were parents’ reactions when you say schooling is so important at the age of Covid, what, what do parents say at the age of Covid what do parents say.

Lakshmi: Interestingly? So we first started in Tamil Nadu and in Krishnagiri district. Fortunately parents do place a lot of value on education, which is good, and I was pleasantly surprised, but, Yeah, sometimes like you said, it’s if funds are a constraint, then the boy goes to a premium school and the girl to a not supreme school or whatever that is, since we are anyway doing the Anganwadi model, we’re very happy for all the girls to come to because that’s free school.

Absolutely. We are happy to give her that education. So that part is okay, but the thing is, Parents, their image of education for their child. Yeah. Unfortunately is my child getting on a school bus wearing a uniform, wearing shoes? The content is something that they’re not, so some of them are not aware.

They themselves don’t have the level of education that’s needed to appreciate content. I explained to them why this is needed. And this is not low level and explain to them how much montessori the education actually costs. And some of them who knew that were more appreciative of this.

But that was an interesting thing for them. But the minute the child starts speaking in English, anything is fun, of course. So English is something that has a lot of glamour. So that’s there. Now, the second place where we started was in VR Hills, Karnataka, which is a group of tribal hamlets right now.

There we faced a challenge. It’s nothing to do with girls or boys. Parents simply didn’t bother to send their children. I think one thing was the anganwadis did not have that image of being a school, right? It was A daycare centre or a midday meal centre, even less. It was just a midday meal. You go there, you eat.

So if they’re not very happy, they said, okay, might as well feed them. And if the house was a little further away, they’d say, if you want to come and pick them up and drop them, but I’m not walking with my child that far. Let them just be at home. I found that motivation was much less Yeah.

Lower than in other rural areas, or at least in Tamil Nadu, it’s not a, I can see that because, We’ve recently also started in Kodegal and Kolar, and I’m seeing a lot of traction from the parents. Right. 

Mridula: So, I mean, and that’s quite an amazing model Lakshmi that we have seen in terms of somebody actually partnering with an anganwadi to make a reform.

And of course we’ll talk a little bit more about your model in terms of how closely you work with them. But before we get to that Maybe a little bit about your experience of working with the government itself. One thing that, of course when you said for the first time that you’re gonna be working with the anganwadi sector I don’t know if we cautioned you, but we were certainly very worried about it, saying, okay, is this gonna work?

Is this scalable? How much resistance are you going to have? Trying to transform a sector, which is. We all know it has been difficult to work with in the past. Maybe you wanna share a little bit about what your experience has been working in that space, working with state governments. 

Lakshmi: So there are two parts with which the government mission has been quite supportive, both in both the states thankfully, they’re quite open to public private partnership.

And if we can contribute to what is offered in the anganwadis, through, you trained teachers and things like that because there is anganwadi worker and a helper in every centre, as and it’s running quite well as far as the health nutrition needs of the children are concerned and the mid day meal all the way up to the mid day meal and the care that the children are given safe.

They have working parents, and they need a place to stay. They’re very safe. Place. So it’s a very wonderful run, I would say now when it comes to education. So definitely the Ministry of Women, department of Women Child Development has a curriculum and they have to give training to the other workers, the anganwadi workers.

Now, the anganwadi worker has quite a bit on her plate. She’s basically the face of anganwadi to the community. So there’s so much going on and education is something, it’s not as effective when it’s. Done in one’s spare time. It has to be done day on day, religiously, rigorously at a certain time.

And the children need a routine. They start at a certain time, they finish at a certain time, and that helps in their development as well. And that’s where we are going to support. Yeah. And in many of the centres that we support whenever the worker has time, she joins. So sometimes the rhymes and the local language are introduced by her, and the English sciences are introduced by our teacher, and it’s a nice collaboration, a nice collaboration, very nice collaboration.

Like an extra pair of hands is always good. Of course when we’re talking about handling toddlers. Yeah. Sometimes the helper is on leave. Yeah. And then this lady has to cook and she has to do all her other work, and then she has to also take care of the safety of the children. So our teachers pitched in that night.

Mridula: Yeah, That’s like a real example of public private partnerships in many ways. And I offer you a lot of the model works with sponsorships, donations which come in from the various corporations. Anything that you want to talk about on that front, on the inference of that? 

Lakshmi: Sure. So we started off with only education. Yeah. We said we only focused on that. But if the toilet is not functional, yeah. Or the building has issues, if it’s just damp, then our own material is going to get spoiled. It’s not good for the children’s health either. So we said, no, we are not gonna stop with this. So wherever we run our education program, we do infra there.

We don’t do standalone infra for any anganwadis. It’s a package. Right. That again, the government has been very happy with that. So we built one full anganwadi we are building a classroom for a government school now. Yeah. And we’ve renovated around almost 10 anganwadi centres with waterproofing, floor tiling, toilets.

Name it, whatever is needed. Basically government funds can come later, but then if that’s taking time, let’s just do it. So we’ve done a lot of infra work since last year. So for the infra work, we’ve got corporate funding. We’ve got corporate funding, and the other biggest cost for us is our teacher salaries.

These are the two main things. The learning material, of course, yes. So learning material. Also, we’ve started getting corporate funding since last year, and we are now CSR certified, so it helps us access CSR points. And for the teacher salaries, we’ve been relying on individual donations from friends, family, and whoever, and we are putting in our, my husband and I are the trustee, so we are putting in our own personal funds as well.

Yeah. So whenever we fall short we just put in the money. 

Mridula: Sure. That’s, and that’s great to hear a very kind of unique model. No, I know you share a lot of videos with me on how your children are learning and every time there’s so much excitement. And I get thrilled when I receive a video from you, from a remote child in the back of a tribal forest actually coming forward and talking with confidence. Forget the learning, just the social emotional quotient of this child. So you wanna talk a little bit about which are the maybe one or two.

Lakshmi: Like you said, the confidence. These children are so one that they now want to stand in the place of the teacher and actually take the class right hand. The class and their classmates listen in wrapped attention.

That’s the best part of it. So that requires a lot of confidence actually telling the teacher, I’m gonna go up there and take class. Even adults have stage fear, right? Yeah. So it’s, I love that about what we are doing. So that is one. And the other one is that they love coming to school.

Yeah. So all the parents tell us that at about 8:00 AM or something, he puts on his bag and he says, why do I have to wait till 9:30? I want to go now. Yeah. And for me, that’s a great win because if the child likes coming to school, Then everything else happens automatically. And of course the big stage would give you the advantages so we can see them teaching one another and learning from the other.

And then again, in terms of the confidence and lateral thinking, I’m seeing that develop a lot. So this child was sitting with this movable alphabet, and then he had the two letter Bs. He puts it like this, and then he says, he yells, he says miss. And all of us run there thinking he’s in danger or something, and he says, I made a wrong mistake, and brilliant, really. And they challenge the teachers. The teacher asked, what’s the colour of a banana? And then he said, white? She said, no yellow. He said, no, you open the peel and check it’s white. So it actually encourages them to think differently. Yeah. And we of course have trained our teachers because a lot of this, the material can be there, the teachers can be there, but unless the philosophy is followed, nothing works, we very religiously follow the philosophy, or at least we.

Tell our teachers, which, where a lot of audits happen and all that, please acknowledge that. Yes, it is indeed white on the inside and yellow on the outside. Yeah. So that’s something that’s fun and in terms of outcomes, after they graduate from our program yesterday on the annual day a parent came and shared that.

The first batch of students who were with us in 19, 2019 and moved away from whichever schools they’ve gone to, apparently they’re all toppers in their respective classes. Yes. That is something that’s, we were not about topping and all that at all, but that’s again, like you said an unintended outcome.

Yes, and I would actually attribute a lot of that to two things. One is the conceptual understanding that the children gain. Because of the pedagogy and the method. And the second one is the confidence with which they’re able to approach. The second thing the parents told us was that none of these children need extra tuition, whereas their older siblings who didn’t go through our program, they’re all having to get support from tuition teachers.

Lakshmi: That’s really really amazing. And I remember you religiously attending several BLTs to make sure that you get the philosophy right. Not many entrepreneurs take so much effort, but for you, the scale was always in the back of your head that I needed to go and translate this to so many other people.

And it’s amazing that the teachers have been able to adopt that philosophy. And for us, it’s always been widely, we follow the Montessori pedagogy and it’s invited us at least as far as the thought process goes, that along with foundational literacy and numeracy the social emotional is not an add-on.

It’s part of the system. Absolutely. So these are three things which are very closely integrated with each other, with the literacy university and the social portion. And it’s amazing to see that if a child in a remote area can do it, then yes, every child in India can get to that with just the right environment, which is the right hand holding to some extent.

So it’s. Great to see some of these videos as proof of yes. Children can do it. 

Lakshmi: Absolutely. And one of the questions that people always still ask me, which initially I used to ask myself, not anymore is fine. You do this up to eight, six, and then what? They have to go back to the same system. Yeah. So at the beginning it used to bother me a lot.

But then now I know that, we definitely give them a much better launch Yeah. Into their academic life then any other school.

Mridula: Health quality programs in early years definitely reduce the job rate in class five. There’s just no doubt about it. So it’s a lifetime foundation that they’re getting.

It’s not just for these three years, which is great to see. And finally, Lakshmi. I want to really talk about this model that you adopted. We’ve always felt at Kreedo that this is a model that is sustainable, that can make sustainable change. In the children and this, the whole systemic change is needed, not small pieces, which is what you have adopted to a large extent.

You wanna share some experiences in terms of why you chose this model versus others? 

Lakshmi: Sure. Like you said, one choice was to run a chain of preschools. Yeah. The rule book says that preschools have to be run on the ground floor, no first floor. And the rule, unlike your cities like Bangalore and things like that, people don’t just have two, three houses, one, a couple of them as an investment and want to live in kind of a thing, right?

Most people live in that one house that they own, right? Space itself was a constraint. And when you run preschools, there’s a lot of permissions. One has to get right and every year they have to be tenure. So it’s a lot of administrative work and I thought it’ll take us away from the core of what our focus is.

One early childhood education. And I didn’t want to lose focus and then we are handling so many other things as well. And then child safety. So I said, let’s do the Anganwadi thing because the space is available, the children are available. And then it’s a set-up that’s been running for years from the seventies.

And the worker and the helper, they know the village and they’re there to take care of the personal needs of the children and the safety. So our budget also goes down, right? So we just. Focus on something that only we can give, that we are better at, or something like that. And then we started following that.

I know a lot of NGOs prefer to do capacity building. Yes. That would be ideal to have the anganwadi worker or staff member trained in the long run and for them to run it right. To make them run it now, at least to begin with. We definitely didn’t want to go that way because like I said, the anganwadi worker is quite busy, he has a lot of work and they.

A little bit of support is definitely useful and when we hire our own teachers and send them, then I have a much better quality control on the quality of what we are trying to deliver. Interesting. You asked this question because in Kola when we launched in five anganwadi centres, the DC and the CEO of the district, Kate, and they said, we want to help our own or empower our own anganwadi workers, do it.

I said, yes, we can do it. Then we talked about a pilot where we take about five centres where the anganwadi worker is motivated and she’s keen on doing it, and then we, yeah, when that becomes a success and then we roll it out or something like that. So it there are a lot of things that need to be addressed before we get into something like that, but yeah, there is some talk about it, but we are still a little away from that.

Mridula: Really quite a story, Lakshmi and I think we have so many more stories to share, but it’s been great hearing Lakshmi’s Journey. I heard the stories and snippets that we sometimes get to hear from each of our centres. She does share with us regularly some of these very heart touching stories, sometimes difficult stories, and sometimes really inspirational stories. So I hope all of you enjoyed listening to Lakshmi’s Journey.

It’s quite unique and I know a lot of entrepreneurs, especially a lot of women entrepreneurs out there. Want to get onto this journey of their dream of starting a preschool, starting an early education centre, working in education in some way, contributing in some way. So we hope to bring you a lot more interesting episodes like this one and yeah, do subscribe to our channel if you want to learn more.

Thank you for listening to us.

Our Guest: Lakshmi Ramamurthy

Lakshmi Ramamurthy is the Founder and Managing Trustee of the Amyga Foundation charitable trust. After an accomplished career in Finance and Learning & Development with multinational firms, Lakshmi is looking to foster quality education at an affordable cost in rural India. She is a CA and CWA by qualification, and is an accomplished singer in Carnatic and Hindustani classical music.