SEATTLE: A glamorous fashion show by top-notch designers Satya Paul and Deepika Gehani. Miss India winners and other top models strutting down the runway. This year's Pratham Annual West Coast galas are to be held in Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles on September 12, 13 and 14 respectively, promise all this and more.
The three galas will be held at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, the Marriott at Fremont and the Hyatt Regency at Long Beach respectively. Over the years, the Annual galas hosted by the various chapters of Pratham USA have emerged as the prime events for individuals and organizations that care about child literacy in India.
This year Pratham USA's West Coast chapters - Seattle, San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles - will celebrate the power of giving during three glamour-filled evenings. Satya Paul and Deepika Gehani are two of the hottest design labels in India. Miss India 2008, Simran Mundi, Miss India 2007 Sarah Jane Dias and Miss India 2004, Sayali Bhagat will be among the top models showcasing the collection.
In addition to the fashion show, the events will feature a cocktail hour, an elegant sit-down dinner, music and dance. Popular Bollywood and TV actress Simone Singh will be the emcee for the evening. Dr Sam Pitroda, Chairman of the National Knowledge Commission and best known for his role in sparking off India's telecom revolution, will be the Keynote Speaker at the Bay Area and Los Angeles galas.
Star Indian comedian, Dan Nainan, will also perform at these two events. Rahul Bose, Bollywood actor and the star of films like Mr and Mrs Iyer, will also be making a special appearance at the LA event. Supermodel Saira Mohan will model the final outfit. "Pratham facilitates a child's opportunity to melt the boundaries of their hopes, dreams, and achievements. I am delighted to be a part of this effort," she said. Proceeds from the evening will benefit Pratham's education programs for underprivileged children in India.
Pratham, India's largest non-profit in the area of primary education, was founded in 1994 with the support of UNICEF. Pratham initially focused on operating community pre-schools (balwadis) in the slums of Mumbai. The teachers were young women from the community, who were trained by Pratham to be balwadi teachers.
The community itself provided space for the pre-schools in public spaces, homes and places of worship. Today Pratham's programs have expanded in scope and scale.
Its direct programs, including community pre-schools, libraries, and remedial learning, address several barriers to learning and reach out to over 200,000 children per day in cities and villages across India! At the same time, its fundamental approach of relying on the community for manpower and resources has not changed.
This approach keeps costs low and ensures that the community's involvement remains high. In October 2000, the World Bank and the Government of Japan's Global Development Network recognized Pratham as one of the three most innovative development projects in the world.
In 2005, Pratham conducted the first Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), a survey of the reading and arithmetic skills of hundreds of thousands of children all across India, generating a picture of the status of children's learning outcomes in the country.
Since then, it has become an annual exercise carried out across villages all across India. In 2007, the survey covered more than 720,000 children, 16,000 villages and 13,200 schools across 567 of India's 602 districts.
ASER has today emerged as a powerful tool for advocacy in education by focusing the attention of policy-makers on the quality of education being imparted in schools. One of the critical findings of ASER was that although more than 90 percent of children are enrolled in school, less than half can read or write fluently even by grade 5.
Based on this insight, Pratham launched the Read India campaign in 2007 to improve the quality of teaching and learning in existing schools by working with both governments and communities.
This campaign aims to teach over 60 million children all across India how to read, write and do arithmetic by 2010. In the first 6 months of the campaign, more than 17 million children in over 270,000 villages across 19 states have learnt how to read. Pratham has also formed partnerships with over 15 state governments.
Central to Read India are Pratham's accelerated learning techniques, which are proven to teach a child how to read, write, and do basic math in 2 months. Pilot projects in the states of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh in 2005 and 2006 have confirmed that these results are replicable on a large scale.
In 2007, Pratham was the first beneficiary of the partnership between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to improve the quality of education in developing countries.
The $9.1 million grant, spread over 3 years, will support Read India in 100 districts across the country. In January 2008, Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, awarded Pratham a $2 million grant to support an independent institute to conduct ASER as well as other large-scale assessments in the education sector.
The ultimate goal is to expand these types of assessments to other sectors like health. Pratham USA, a volunteer-driven non-profit organization, supports Pratham's critical work in India by raising awareness and funds. Pratham USA currently has active chapters in 9 cities across the US.
Its supporters include several foundations and corporations as well as individual philanthropists from both within and outside the Indo-American community. Last year, Pratham USA raised almost $11 million for Pratham's programs.
At the same time, it has successfully kept its costs extremely low. Its administrative expenses accounted for just 2.5% of its budget.
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