Ananya studied Chemistry, Neuroscience and Liberal Arts before switching to Education. She has been a teacher in rural schools, opened a school in a village, designed and implemented, and evaluated at-scale interventions. She is driven by interdisciplinary educational approaches aimed to reduce social inequalities. She is the Co-founder of SwaTaleem Foundation.

SwaTaleem believes in the power of collaboration and bottom-up approach towards solving a social problem, where community drives its own learning trajectory on a certain set of areas it wants expertise on. It works with existing platforms, instead of creating parallel structures and move towards long term systemic integration. It works with Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya (KGBVs) which is a chain of schools across India and work with teachers, school wardens, local leaders, and government officials.

It integrates elements like Resilience, Growth Mindset, Problem Solving etc. by seeking insights from Educational Psychology as these have been proven to be effective in achieving cognitive, social and emotional change. The emphasis on stakeholders driving their own learning trajectory and it is playing the role of facilitators to bring sustainability to its program, rather than creating dependency in the long run. It aims to bring this at the system level eventually connecting all KGBVs across the country so that the best practices can be shared and expanded to other possible geographies.

In this interview with Deepak Nanda from CSRBOX, she talks about the following points:

1. What was your idea behind starting SwaTaleem and why the focus on underrepresented adolescent girls?

2. Considering there is already an overflow of organizations working in the domain of education, What is it that SwaTaleem is doing differently to improve learning outcomes?

3. Having shifted from Chemistry, neuroscience, and liberal arts, how do you see the flow of interdisciplinary approaches into education?

4. What is your approach to volunteering as a means to expand a project?

5. You have been engaged in a lot of research work and program development for government teachers. What are some of the learnings that you had during the same about the perspective around the education of the institutions and what would you say are the missing-links to making dissemination of education more effective?

Impact-Talk is a series of views and interviews of CSR heads, impact leaders and change-makers, addressing development challenges in India. If you have an impact-maker in your network, please suggest/share details at csr@ngobox.org