NIPUN Bharat: System reform journey from salience and policy to design, rollout & green-shoots of impact

• In Event: Implementation Science? Decoding the complexity and contextual nature of system change work in large scale government-nonprofit collaborative programs in India

Proposal

India has taken the lead amongst LMICs on prioritizing FLN (Foundational Literacy & Numeracy) as part of Education Policy. FLN was called out as the most important priority in India’s NEP 2020 (National Education Policy 2020). This was followed by the launch of India’s FLN Mission- NIPUN (National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding & Numeracy) Bharat.

At CSF (Central Square Foundation), system reform has been a key principle of our work & approach since we setup in 2012. CSF started working in two of the largest Indian states - Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Uttar Pradesh (UP) - on FLN in 2019 prior to both, NEP 2020 and NIPUN Bharat. The critical decision point for CSF was whether to build all capabilities internally or collaborate with like-minded nonprofit partners with complementary capabilities also oriented towards system reform. We steered towards the latter option because there were other nonprofits who had a strong technical understanding of FLN academic design and we had existing relationships with some of them from the first phase of our work as a donor in the Indian education philanthropy network.

In our experience of leading FLN coalition of nonprofit partners across MP & UP, the key success factors have been (a) the organization’s strategic commitment to step away from existing approach of point solutions as service delivery nonprofits to working as a government partner for system reform, (b) acceptance of complementary capabilities amongst partners coming together to work as a coalition and the (c) availability of funding to support system reform. While the NIPUN Bharat program and the state FLN programs have been implemented only for about three years, there are strong green shoots emerging. Both in MP and UP, evaluations have shown that student learning is improving significantly throughout the state as well as in some demonstration districts.

There is significant learning in terms of what can be done better in these large-scale government and nonprofit partnerships. The following are the most important ones: (a) More clarity and consensus on roles and responsibilities across partner organizations, (b) More well-defined accountability for deliverables, given the challenging contexts of Covid, bureaucratic transfers and elections, and (c) Deepening government engagement by working with political leadership at state level and also second layer of education bureaucracy, and this required even closer coordination across partners. Digital tools have also played a key role in supporting student assessments, collection and analysis of classroom observation data and prioritizing the effort of the educational administration based on evidence from the field. The energy and commitment in India around NIPUN, and early green shoots of success reaffirm the commitment of nonprofit partners to FLN system reform, in deep partnership with the Government.

Author

• Shaveta Sharma, Central Square Foundation