Closing the learning gap: Role of Ed-Tech and venture philanthropy in building a skilled workforce

The Hindu

16-05-2025

Addressing educational inequity is a critical step towards building a Viksit Bharat. Ensuring access to quality learning for all children and young adults across all socio-economic spectrums is essential to reaping India's demographic dividend and driving inclusive growth.
However, resource constraints continue to be a reality in our education system, creating a significant disparity between access and actual learning. This learning gap directly contributes to rising unemployability, with only one in two graduates today being job-ready.
At the same time, increasing internet penetration and rapid technological advancements present an unprecedented opportunity to bridge this divide. By leveraging high-quality, tech-driven solutions for education and skill development, we can level the playing field and equip every young person to succeed in a rapidly evolving world.
Innovative new models and solutions are needed to meet the educational needs of today's students, in an increasingly AI-led economy - and supporting new innovations, by definition, involves risk. A venture philanthropy approach can play a transformative role in this endeavour. Supporting early-stage, mission-aligned founders with risk friendly, catalytic, non-dilutive capital and connecting them with the right advisors can accelerate the pace of innovation in the ed-tech sector across all levels of the value chain.
This strategy is particularly crucial for organizations catering to the Bharat audience, where the ed-tech ecosystem is still in its nascent stages. Critically, we see a role for such philanthropic capital to enable both non-profits as well as impact-first affordable commercial solutions which may struggle to monetize during their early years.
Ed-Tech serving the poor
Foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) is recognized as the bedrock for future learning, yet less than half of grade 5 students can read a grade 2 text. One successful example is Rocket Learning, an ed-tech not-for-profit that leverages unique AI-powered WhatsApp solutions to equip both Anganwadi workers and low-income parents with the knowledge and tools to support their children's early learning. With partnerships with 10 State governments, they have meaningfully impacted 3 million children in just four years, demonstrating the potential of scalable tech-driven interventions.
At the K-12 level, Vidyakul serves as a powerful demonstration of what affordable access to quality learning can achieve. They provide after-school learning support to state board students of classes 9 to 12 in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Gujarat through live and recorded classes created by local teachers.
With an unwavering focus on their target audience evident in every aspect of their strategy, from product design to pricing, Vidyakul has not only made quality education more accessible but has also demonstrated that impactful, Bharat-centric for-profit ed-tech solutions can be sustainable.
The focus on employability beyond school is equally critical, as it helps break generational cycles of poverty. In today's fast-changing job market, an educational degree alone is no longer enough to guarantee success. Young individuals entering the workforce need targeted training, continuous upskilling, and placement assistance to thrive.
LearnTube addresses this need by curating top content from the web into structured, bite-sized courses tailored to support learners in achieving their individual professional goals. With over 1.5 million users to date, LearnTube leverages technology to deliver high-quality, personalized learning experiences at a fraction of the cost of many other ed-tech skilling organizations, with paid plans starting at INR 299/month.
The future of India's growth story depends on how well we equip our youth with the knowledge and skills they need. Strategic philanthropy must act as a driving force to truly transform learning for India's young people—investing in and scaling high-impact ed-tech social enterprises, both non-profit and for-profit models, designed for Bharat. By aligning philanthropic efforts with innovative ed-tech solutions, we can unlock a brighter, more equitable future for millions—ensuring that no one is left behind in the pursuit of progress.
(Sowjanya Kanuri is director, ACT For Education that aims to enable the bottom three quartiles of India's population to learn effectively by harnessing the power of Ed-Tech interventions)