Highest education accolade, Yidan Prize, for Pratham CEO Rukmini Banerji

Rukmini Banerji, CEO of Pratham Education Foundation, has been awarded the world’s highest education accolade, the 2021 Yidan Prize for Education Development, for her work in improving learning outcomes. Among Banerji’s pioneering work, along with Pratham’s team, is the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) assessment approach that revealed literacy and numeracy gaps among children who have already spent several years at school.

To close these gaps, Banerji’s teams’ ‘Teaching at the Right Level’ (TaRL) programme works with schools and local communities to provide basic reading and arithmetic skills, ensuring no child is left behind, with the replicable model now reaching millions of children annually across India and spreading around the globe.

Commenting on her work during a panel discussion at the Yidan Prize Summit, Banerji reiterated the data that showed how while almost all children began at the same level of reading and arithmetic abilities in India, by third grade 70 per cent were left behind.

Talking about Banerji’s Yidan Prize and her work at Pratham, 2019 Nobel laureate economist Abhijit Banerjee described her as “both an academic and an activist”. “She made us understand conceptually how education has failed and helped us develop methods to deal with it,” he said.

Fellow panelist, 2019 Nobel laureate and economist Esther Duflo asserted that Rukmini had not only turned the problem of education on its head by focusing on firstly getting children into schools and then adding learning well as the end of Pratham’s means. “Pratham is not an NGO as much as a movement,” said Duflo.

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