Community Focused Solutions

Rocket Learning Co-founders – Namya Mahajan, Siddhant Sachdeva and Vishal Sunil have studied in prestigious educational institutes such as Harvard, IIT Delhi and University of Rochester. They have also worked in the development, technology and consulting realms and have first-hand seen the power of communities, technology and at-scale solutions transforming large systems and companies.

While having the opportunity and circumstances to get access to education themselves, they are very cognizant of the fact that today, millions of children don’t have access to quality education and the problem starts at the very early ages of 3-8 years. 

There are three key areas of focus for them in the next year:

•Scaling their solution to 2-2.5 million children across 6-7 states: This means significant increase in their impacted children/parent base, a deepening of their partnership in existing states as well as adding new state, central government partnerships to further their reach. Their aim is to make Rocket Learning a social unicorn in the impact/edtech space.

•Ensuring deeper impact for each child: While working at scale, they want to ensure that they can deepen their impact via product improvements, deeper research in behaviour change for low-income communities. 

•Building a diverse, inclusive organisation with high retention: Being a tech non-profit organisation, they have teams ranging from AI/ML experts to on-ground field teams, and they want to ensure that they can build a diverse and inclusive organisation which also gives enough opportunity, pay and path to grow for their employees across teams. 

Through varied experiences across the development sector, entrepreneurial stints and in the corporate world, Namya, Siddhant and Vishal have all seen the power of technology-led community focused solutions which drive change in large systems and corporations. What drives them is the belief that it is possible to transform a system as large as the Indian educational system by leveraging technology as an enabler, by building an engine of positive behaviour change. 

Few strategies and techniques that have worked in the Rocket Learning culture are:

• Open, inclusive communication across the team: The leadership teams, the functional teams all come together every week digitally (during the Covid-19 pandemic) to ensure share-backs, learnings and also to hear experiences of different teams and employees. This practice is just a small example of the culture of open and inclusive communication that has ensured high employee satisfaction at Rocket Learning

• Building a strong leadership group in the initial one to two years: They have ensured that they have a home-grown team of leaders who have risen within their teams, have started off in junior positions and are now taking on more responsibilities as the opportunity presents. These are incredibly motivated and passionate people who have led their teams during a time as tough as the pandemic and are ready to go above and beyond. This leadership group and a high retention rate among them, has helped them move towards their goals effectively.