Google offers $3m grants to Indian NGOs for education

With the objective to provide quality education in India through e-learning, Google.org, the philanthropic arm of tech giant Google, on Thursday announced an additional grant of $3 million to two Indian non-profit organisations – Central Square Foundation and The Teacher App.

“We strongly believe that technology can play a powerful part in solving the learning gap in India, and we are expanding our investments in India to ensure that all teachers and students are able to benefit from it,” Google.org Education Lead Nick Cain was quoted as saying by a news agency.

Saying that limited access to quality materials and under-resourced teachers are some of the challenges, Cain said these new funds will help towards building more locally relevant solutions and content for students and teachers.

With a $1 million grant from Google, The Teacher App plans to provide training and resources to teachers on the concepts of Math, Science, Language, and Pedagogy. The funds will help in scaling the platform to reach about 500,000 teachers in two years.

Apart from $2 million grant and technical assistance from Google, the Central Square Foundation will also receive technical help from the YouTube Learning team. This additional help from YouTube will support a minimum of 20 content creators to produce at least 200 hours of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics-related content in Hindi and other vernacular languages.

The grants to these two NGOs are part of Google’s global commitment of USD 50 million to help these organisations scale existing initiatives and fund content creation and teacher training through tech-based learning solutions.

According to reports, Google.org had last year given a grant of USD 8.4 million to four Indian NGOs — Learning Equality, Million Sparks Foundation, Pratham Books – StoryWeaver and Pratham Education Foundation. These grantees have reached more than eight lakh students and teachers with their tools and programmes across India after receiving funds from the Google.

India is the largest recipient of these grants, ahead of countries like Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia.

As per MHRD data, over 11 lakh teachers who are currently teaching in schools are not properly trained. Another report from the World Bank showed that there are about 1.3 lakh single teacher-schools in India.

With the latest additional grants, Google.org’s total grant for NGOs in India to support learning and education efforts stands at $11.4 million.