Powered by passion for pre-school learning

How Rocket Learning is laying the foundation of education for children from low-income families

At Rocket Learning, Azeez Gupta and his leadership team of bright young peers are driven by one ambition — to change the academic fate of children at the bottom of the pyramid.

Gupta, 30, landed a consulting job with Mckinsey after graduating from IIT Delhi. He then joined the NGO Pratham, went to do an MBA from Harvard Business School (HBS) as an education innovator, worked at a edtech startup in the US and came back to rejoin Pratham. In May 2020, he quit Pratham to start his own venture: Rocket Learning.

In the midst of the pandemic, he joined forces with a similarly highly qualified bunch to set up the kind of team one expects in unicorns typically. Utsav Kheria, 35, an IIM Ahmedabad alumnus who had co-founded Edubridge, a livelihood-focussed social enterprise, teamed up with Gupta. Namya Mahajan, 28, who was leading Gujarat’s SEWA (Selfemployed Women’s Association) Cooperative Federation and overseeing its childcare advocacy, joined in, bringing community engagement expertise to the table. She is an alumnus of Harvard College and HBS.

Weeks later, Vishal Sunil, 26, a drone expert who was heading the tech team at Us-based Kestrel Agritech, came on board. Lastly, Siddhant Sachdeva, 28, an IIT Delhi and IIM Kolkata alumnus, joined after leaving BCG where he’d led private and public sector transformation projects in banking and manufacturing in India and Indonesia.

The highly qualified and skilled founders have given up fat pay cheques to earn ~80,000 or thereabouts a month in the startup, where entrants get ~25,000.

Rocket Learning seeks to develop early childhood and foundational learning in Indian children aged between three and eight years. To do so, they attempt to win over the parents by changing their “AIM” (awareness, information and motivation). A vast majority of parents at the lowest rungs of society — nearly 200 million across India — remain incapable of securing their children’s education and future. They are denied the luxury to be invested in their children’s future as they are preoccupied with making ends meet.

Rocket Learning wants to explore how low-income parents could take similar interest in their children as their better-off counterparts. By the age of eight, 85 percent of a child’s cognitive development is over so the startup wants to draw in parents early. While literacy and numeracy can be instilled in school, much of brain development precedes these stages and cannot be bridged later. “These children are deprived of everything their highincome counterparts have and we are keen to change that,” explains Gupta.

Government schools often operate in a vacuum leaving parents in the dark. Rocket Learning wants to bring about behavioural change to address this. “At the most, NGOS in the past have tried to counsel parents by reaching them directly with little or no success since they regress quickly even if changes are induced,” Gupta argues.

Reaching out to low-income parents itself has been a big challenge. But in rural India, 65 percent people whose children go government schools have smartphones now (with a 30 per cent increase over the last two years).

Rocker Learning has encouraged teachers in many government schools to create small Whatsapp groups of such parents — the teacher adds the Rocket Learning technology to the group by adding a number. This enables the startup to send audio visual content of activities that can be done by children with the assistance of their parents, even if the latter are uneducated or partly literate. To motivate and bring in accountability parents are asked to send the content and videos back to the group. “When they see the others doing it, there’s a keeping up with the Joneses effect to an extent,” says Gupta. Weekly report cards, “incentives and social rewards like a monthly medal are sent by our platform, which motivate kids and their parents”, he adds.

In Uttar Pradesh, for instance, it roped in cricketer Suresh Raina to make videos of how he and his wife work with their fouryear-old daughter. The startup is part of 10,000 school groups for Classes 1 and 2 in the state.

Rocket Learning has no genuine competitors yet as behavioural change is not easy to pull off. In terms of model, the closest is Convegenius that also works in partnership with governments and uses Whatsapp to share content. But Convegenius’ mainly targets students of sixth grade and above and is a tech-only firm, whereas Rocket Learning is lending support with non-tech parent-focused initiatives too.

The team of around 40 staff is hoping to reach one million children with a budget of around $700,000-$1 million. With its high-powered board and advisors, funding is not a worry as yet.

Ashish Dhawan, founder of Central Square Foundation and philanthropist, chairs the board. Iqbal Dhaliwal, global executive director of J-PAL, Mckinsey Global Institute’s partner Anu Madgavkar, Namita Dalmia, who was until recently with Omidyar Network, and Prashanth Prakash, partner of VC firm Accel India, are either on the board or play advisory roles.

Powered by passion and idealism, as Rocket Learning aims for the sky, its trajectory will be defined by what it manages to achieve on the ground.