Mother Tongue-based Multilingual Early Education and Development Role of PPP and CSR in Scaling Up ECCE Centre for Learning Resources January 14, 2016

ICDS is Huge Budget Allocation: Over Rs.17,000 crore Personnel: Nearly 25 lakh Centres: Over 13 lakh Beneficiaries: Estimated 10 crore

Effective ECCE Needs a Lot More In , ICDS catered to 37 million children in the 3-6 age group, at an average of about 30 children per anganwadi National ECCE policy stipulates no more than 20 children per anganwadi. This implies that, on this count alone, anganwadi numbers need to rise by about 50%, to about 2 million from 1.4 million currently The number of ICDS personnel must increase to about 4 million, from the current about 2.8 million

Central Challenges in Delivering Effective ECCE ECCE is new to ICDS Individual and group capacities need to be built in each of the following areas for nearly 4 million personnel: Articulating clear and implementable policy goals and programme objectives Programme planning and implementation Developing a culture of internal monitoring, supportive supervision, data-driven decision making and accountability Developing transparent mechanisms with wide ownership for assessment of results and using them to modify directions Providing leadership, motivation and inspiration to all stakeholders, including the community

Capacity-building Capacity Currently, about 500 AWTC’s, about 40 MLTC’s and a few hundred more senior trainers are all that is available in the system for capacity-building However, most of them have little understanding of ECCE themselves Among those who do, the understanding is mostly limited to the technical aspects of ECCE, not programme leadership and implementation The actual capacity-building capacity for the specific challenges of ECCE implementation across the country is vanishingly small

Capacity-building Capacity (Contd.) There is no choice but to build implementation capacities and capacity- building capacities simultaneously, using implementation itself consciously as a capacity-building process This means developing leaders who are committed to building other leaders demonstrating pedagogical, institutional and community leadership

Role of Private-Public Partnerships The scale of challenge means that: It is beyond the capacity of the private sector to replace the government The participation of private sector can make a big difference Private participation (non-profit / CSR) must answer to: Long-term sustainability of results Creation of new knowledge Strengthening of systemic capacities Public participation must answer to: Commitment to strengthening implementation and capacity-building capacities Commitment of financial, human and organisational resources

Role of Private-Public Partnerships (Contd.) The appropriate role for private sector (non-profit / CSR) is catalytic: Help develop capacities in an organised manner Help develop meaningful curricula, design processes Help implementation through process support Recognise the strategic, not transactional, role of the engagement

Role of Private-Public Partnerships (Contd.) Private participation is sub-optimal when it does things that the government must do: Build infrastructure Contribute to revenue expenditure Provide human resources that are going to be required for the long-term Supplement facilities that can be / ought to be created by the government It may be possible to consider pilot programmes an exception to this, but it is a superior process if the government takes responsibility for the effectiveness of the pilot also.

Independent Regulation When a dominant provider is its own regulator, we can expect efficiencies to be low, quality compromised, innovation undervalued, competition stifled, and cronyism fostered Independent regulation has the potential to Establish and enforce uniform implementation standards and assessment criteria Provide policy inputs that enhance public good The experience with implementation of RTE provides good reasons to advocate independent regulation for ECCE Public-private partnerships would benefit from a stable regulatory environment fostered by an independent regulator

A CLR Illustration of the Approach ICDS Leadership Development Programme, Chhattisgarh Demonstration of an intervention process for developing the leadership capacities of a relatively large number of people in ICDS with limited application of resources 5 districts, 10 DPO’s/DWCDO’s, 25 CDPO’s, about 300 supervisors, about 7,000 anganwadis. Engaging the entire ICDS population in the target intervention areas Intervention concepts tailored to capacity-building for building capacity Comprehensive systemic engagement with pedagogical, institutional and community leadership dimensions Creation of a long-term resource group within ICDS for future scaling

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