Meet the Interns

Meet the Interns

Last summer, Pratham Education Foundation had the pleasure of working with 7 interns from various Universities outside India, who worked on different projects during their stay. Pratham interviewed each of these interns about their experience, points of view, impressions, opinions and insights. And we will post one a day.. so watch this space to know more about these interesting people and their exprerience in Pratham and India.

Carolina Garayzar and Christian Norton

Carolina and Christian at the Dayalpur ULC

Carolina and Christian are from Mexico City and are happily married. They are both currently doing their Masters in Public Policy from the University of Chicago, having done Economics in their Bachelors Degree. During their internship, their focus was on Urban Learning Centres (ULCs) in Delhi for a duration of 9 weeks, where they were doing an external and internal evaluation of the 17 ULCs in Delhi. 







Internal evaluation consists of understanding if the Centres are working properly and achieving their goals to improve the learning levels of children. The external evaluation is report building for donors about the outcomes of the programs. The couple had visited the 17 Centres in Delhi and did interviews with teachers, Centre in-charges and the parents to evaluate the outcomes. They wrote a description of each of the neighborhoods and the programs of each Centres. They wrote about their recommendations about better management etc. of the Centres. They wanted to work with Pratham because Dr.Rukmini Banreji did her PhD at the University of Chicago and she came in October 2011 to give a small presentation about Pratham and India and they were impressed with Pratham’s work. They were very interested in Pratham’s community-based approach. They worked on a video of one of the Learning Centres along with a high school student from Chicago who was interning with Pratham as well. There is a Pratham Chicago Gala scheduled to be sometime in the future where they will give information about Pratham and they will present their experience.

The main challenge the couple had noticed is that it is hard for the Pratham team to convince parents that education is very necessary. They have seen that the parents are not educated, and so they can see that it is hard for them to understand how important education is because sometimes the children help their parents at work to bring additional income to the household. According to them, the quality of education is also a big challenge. The Mexican situation and Indian situation is a similar challenge - teacher union, wrongly placed incentives for teachers, low quality of education and low income levels. Pratham model in the current Mexican context is an option so there’s a lot that they took from the Pratham example. They want to create Pratham Mexico. Power of community engagement is enormous. If you have teachers from the community, they will be more engaged with the students and there’s a more social engagement. As an NGO, if you work in a partnership with the government, it’s the only way to create real outcome and Pratham is doing that.