The Tamarind Tree Trust is a non-profit organization based in Dahanu, Maharashtra.  Founded in 2007, we are committed to building an equitable and just society where individuals and communities can realize their full potential. We situate ourselves at the juncture of knowledge, media and technology with the belief that they play a significant role in overcoming social exclusion and a lack of voice that are the root problems of poverty.

Areas of Work

Our main areas of work are :

• Creating a prototype of "future-ready" Elementary school in rural India by the deployment of global Open Education Resources and Technologies.
• Creating an environment in which high-quality education is recognized as every child's right and accessible to all like free air.
• Building a mesh of Open Educational Resources (OERs) for learners and educators.

We do this through the following programmes:

The Tamarind Tree School

The organization runs a  "Future Ready" Elementary School in the tribal district of Palghar, Maharashtra. The school caters to the first generation Tribal learners with English being the medium of instruction. The school has developed and deployed a digital learning eco-system, that can be replicated in poor infrastructure regions.  Students in the Tamarind Tree school learn in an environment that encourages them to become independent learners for life, be adaptable, collaborative, and work to become globally astute citizens with skills to be employable. 

My Big Campus - An Open Learning Platform

Essentially developed for the students of Tamarind Tree, our open learning platform, My Big Campus is on its way to being available to all who need it. During the current academic year, we piloted in two locations with a detailed plan for rolling it out pan-India. My Big Campus is an interactive online environment that allows students to navigate through elementary subjects at a pace and speed comfortable to them. Designed on the NCERT curriculum, the platform empowers educators with necessary tools and sharp data analytics to assess and track each student on a realtime basis, considerably improving the efficiency of the education system and ultimately leave a positive impact on the learning levels of the students.

Educational Content Production

Tamarind Tree has an in house digital content production studio that develops interactive online course content, digital modules, animations, simulations and videos. The Tamarind Tree Studio skill set is diverse and focused on creating content for primary education. How can we wean a whole generation of students away from rote learning? How do we encourage a learner to understand concepts rather than getting stuck in procedures? How do we make learning a wonderful adventure rather than a necessary chore are some of the questions we try to answer in our studio.

Philosophy

We believe learning is a right, not a privilege. Knowledge must be free, like the air we breathe. We are part of the global movement on Open Educational Resources (OERs) that believes every learner has a right to access high-quality learning resources. We work to build educational equity by producing, sharing, collaborating, remixing and releasing learning content in the public domain.

• Comprehensive in-house capabilities  in building technology and systems
• Ability to harness high quality global digital resources and customize solutions for Elementary Education
• Our content generation model is based on the global Open Education movement which assures freedom to use, adapt and redistribute, making the whole process cost-effective.
• Flexibility enthusiasm to try out new ideas, leading to constant innovation and improvement.

Tamarind Tree is an organization deeply committed to changing the landscape of Elementary Education in India with a sharp focus on:

• Scalability
• Quantifiable Data generation
• Tuned to be on the frontiers of technological innovations
• Ears to the ground

Tamarind Tree understands the NGO-Corporate partnership has gone far beyond a simplistic philanthropic approach. While NGOs are hard-pressed to prove their raison d'être, corporates justifiably expect value for money. Tamarind Tree with its data-driven decision-making process and robust   Learning Management System has been able to achieve a high level of transparency in the impact assessment processes. Given that all our systems are online, our corporate partners can have a realtime view of the projects and impact.

NGOs, in its endeavor, to create "Social Profit" have a lot to learn from the corporates its expertise at generating a surplus. At Tamarind Tree, we aspire to work closely with our corporate partners and forge that partnership in the true sense. What began as a donor-recipient relationship must get transformed into a true partnership is what we firmly believe.