Highest education accolade, Yidan Prize, for Pratham CEO Rukmini Banerji

Banerji has been awarded for her work in improving learning outcomes

Rukmini Banerji, CEO of Pratham Education Foundation, has been awarded the world’s highest education accolade, the 2021 Yidan Prize for Education Development, for her work in improving learning outcomes. Among Banerji's pioneering work, along with Pratham's team, is the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) assessment approach that revealed literacy and numeracy gaps among children who have already spent several years at school.

To close these gaps, Banerji's teams’ 'Teaching at the Right Level' (TaRL) programme works with schools and local communities to provide basic reading and arithmetic skills, ensuring no child is left behind, with the replicable model now reaching millions of children annually across India and spreading around the globe.

Commenting on her work during a panel discussion at the Yidan Prize Summit, Banerji reiterated the data that showed how while almost all children began at the same level of reading and arithmetic abilities in India, by third grade 70 per cent were left behind.

Talking about Banerji's Yidan Prize and her work at Pratham, 2019 Nobel laureate economist Abhijit Banerjee described her as “both an academic and an activist”. “She made us understand conceptually how education has failed and helped us develop methods to deal with it,” he said.

Fellow panelist, 2019 Nobel laureate and economist Esther Duflo asserted that Rukmini had not only turned the problem of education on its head by focusing on firstly getting children into schools and then adding learning well as the end of Pratham's means. “Pratham is not an NGO as much as a movement,” said Duflo.

About their collaborative work with Pratham, the economists and faculty members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said they were now interested in hybrid learning, early childhood development and getting more policymakers on board. "Education is key to democracy. The idea of being in a society where people are full participants and have access to the benefits of the society is where education plays a central role. Access to education is a fundamental block of a democratic society," Banerjee said.

Elaborating on lessons for the world from Pratham, Banerji said that during the pandemic, parents and siblings came together to help children, even if they were uneducated themselves. “So even after schools open, we hope to engage parents in helping children learn... There are three ways of learning — learning for school, learning for life and learning for work. We need to look at and pay attention to all of these and not so much on just the academic stream,” she added.

Along with Banerji, Eric A Hanushek, Paul and Jean Hanna senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, was also awarded the 2021 Yidan Prize for Education Research for his work on education outcomes and the importance of teaching quality. His work helped shape the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 (ensure inclusive and equitable quality education) by reframing targets for learning outcomes and has shown that it’s how much students learn – and not how many years they spend in school – that boosts economies.