Pratham USA

Pratham’s Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) has drawn attention to a learning crisis in India and motivated policy change by mobilizing volunteers to visit households and assess the basic reading and math skills of over half a million children every year. This grant will help the ASER Centre adapt its annual survey of learning to also measure skills at early childhood, middle school, and secondary school levels. The ASER Centre will ensure that the findings help expand the conversation about learning to a broader set of skills and reach audiences who can do something about the results. The ASER Centre will also help government teacher-training centers and other institutions build capacity for generating and using evidence.

This grant will allow Pratham’s ASER Centre to support seven organizations implementing citizen-led assessments in nine countries to improve their work and increase its visibility. The ASER Centre will also help interested organizations in new countries to learn about and begin piloting their own work on similar assessments as a way to engage citizens in advancing an agenda for better learning outcomes.

Pratham’s Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) has drawn attention to a learning crisis in India and motivated policy change by mobilizing volunteers to visit households across the country and test over 600,000 children. This grant would help the ASER Centre to strengthen its success by continuing an annual survey of learning. It would also allow ASER Centre to conduct research to understand why learning levels are so low, and create tools for measuring a broader set of educational outcomes (beyond basic reading and math). ASER also expects to expand its training programs to build government capacity for generating and absorbing evidence.