Sampark Foundation


Sampark Foundation is an Indian NGO that focuses on primary education.

History

Sampark Foundation was founded in 2005 by Vineet and Anupama Nayar, Vineet serves as the organization's founder chairman. The NGO was developed with the goal of making eighty percent of Indian children capable of basic math and the knowledge of at least five hundred English words with a year of instruction. It is based in New Delhi, India and is funded by a $100 million endowment that has an expiry date of 2025, when ownership of the organization's programs will transfer to government stakeholders and all funds of the trust are intended to be spent.

Programs

In 2016 the foundation began distributing the Sampark Didi, which is an LCD visual and audio device that comes pre-loaded with lessons based upon children's stories. The devices focus on education in both English and Math, both of which are taught with a mixture of English and Hindi. As of 2018 the Sampark Organization had facilitated education for seven million students across 76,000 schools, after training 200,000 teachers to use the aids. Content is set for 120 days of two hours lessons in order to account for rural children who only attend school for part of the year and often only for lunch. Devices are also mandated to be used only at schools and not in the home to encourage in-person attendance. Sampark Foundation has launched an app — Baithak — with a free learning and development platform in Hindi. The platform will provide education to about two crore children across the entire Hindi-speaking belt of Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. This platform followed rapid development and testing process over just 5 weeks and was anchored by the core team at Sampark Innovation Lab.