Prasanna Vadayar - CEO And Trustee, Sikshana Foundation
Sikshana Foundation began its operations in 2003 with a goal of improving the state of public education in the country. The organization initially began working with the Karnataka education department further spreading to six states within India. Prasanna Vadayar, CEO, started off his relations with Sikshana as a donor in 2005 while he was in USA. . Prasanna worked as a software engineer in various companies within US before becoming the founder CEO of Softrends Inc. USA, which he ran for 10 years. Mr Prasanna led a team of passionate people design and scale the Sikshana motivational program called “Prerana” Prior to Sikshana He has a Master’s in Computer Engineering from Texas A&M University
“Our interventions focus on three key concepts Motivate, Engage & Empower.
Motivating the students leads to better utilization of learning inputs, increases student engagement in schooling and empowers them to drive their own learning, which improves their learning outcomes”
In an exclusive interview with TechConnect, Prasanna introduces us to Sikshana Foundation and how it has grown over time. He shares with us his personal journey from IT to education, from for-profit to non-profit and how his learnings and experience have impacted the growth of Sikshana Foundation. One of the flagship projects within Sikshana is “Prerana”, a motivation-based intervention for primary schools.
“Prerana scaled the program from 49 schools to over 2000 schools by 2015 and, in 2017 successfully transferred the program to the Karnataka State Education Department. This platform empowers the stakeholders to showcase their work/programs and enables fine-grained data collection with minimal effort and help in data driven decisions.“
The program now runs across all government primary and secondary schools across the state covering nearly 50,000 schools with over 3,000,000 children from six states. To enable the education department to manage the implementation of the Prerana program along with other Department programs, Prasanna has helped design a software platform “Prerana”. He also shares on key achievements of the organization and its future plans. When asked on NEP2020 Prasanna said, “Sikshana is already aligned with the policies that the government is implementing through NEP. In fact, we have been a part of the discussions and formation of the framework, which also is a major achievement to highlight.”
To watch the complete interview, click below:
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