Meet Namya Mahajan, Aurora Tech Award's third place winner.

In March,?Namya Mahajan?(India)?won third place in inDrives’ Aurora Tech Award for her startup,?Rocket Learning. This makes early childhood education accessible to low-income families by creating tech-enabled digital teacher-parent communities to share daily learning content and quizzes that parents can do with their children at home and teachers can use at school. Rocket Learning provides a scalable and cost-effective model that can impact children's future, today.?

The Aurora Tech team learned more about Namya, inequality and early childhood education, and her approach to entrepreneurship.

“85% of brain development happens before age six”

I grew up with my grandfather's ideals.?He was a civil servant, so he was very socially minded. He wanted me to grow up to do good, not just to do well, and was my first teacher. He grew up during the freedom movement in India. Being part of the process of nation building and reducing inequality was something very dear to his heart.

I used to work with women in the informal economy. That’s when I realized that early childhood care and education are really important.?All the women I worked with agreed that it was vital to give their children good opportunities. But there were not a lot of scalable models that had been set up so far.

The problem of inequality begins early.?In India, more than half of children start first grade without knowing a single letter or number. 85% of brain development actually happens before the age of six. That’s why if you don't teach children by that age, it becomes harder to do so later in life. Our goal is to prepare 35 million children in India for school by the age of six.

Technology must be part of any scalable solution.?In India, 70% of households, even low-income households, now have smartphones. And that number is growing. When we started Rocket, we asked parents and teachers, "What apps do you use regularly?" We found that there are three or four apps that are on every phone: YouTube, WhatsApp, Google, and sometimes Facebook. That's why we've come to WhatsApp and YouTube with our content.

We wanted to meet parents where they were.?Parents and teachers use WhatsApp groups to communicate, and all we need is our number to be added to those groups. We didn't want to force them to download something new. The memory on their devices is small and most of them are first-time digital users. For these reasons, it made sense not to make them download, learn and use a new application.

We started out during COVID, and that helped us reach a lot of parents.?It was an interesting time when parents had to be the first teachers of their children. Schools and daycare centers were closed during the nationwide lockdown. So technology was the only way to reach parents. They really needed our product at that time because their kids were home and they weren't learning.

There are 35 million children in India in the age group we're trying to serve.?No nonprofit or for-profit organization can serve all of these children. There are also more than a million government-funded daycare centers across the country. That's why we wanted to work with our government to scale our program.

Rocket Learning in facts and figures

• $3 million?— funded by venture capital
• >1 million?—?children engaged with an educational content
• 120?— employees
• $0,5?— cost per user a year
• >70 000?— schools partnering with the platform

Reaching for equality

Gender imbalance is a strong reality for most women in our country.?The amount of time an average woman has for productive work, rest or her own health is much less than that of an average man. Many Western countries seem to have closed this gap, but I don't see much difference in some of them. Despite the economic opportunities that exist, women are still the primary caregivers and there is still an imbalance in household work.

I was fortunate to grow up in a family where I was treated as an equal to my brother.?Throughout my childhood, I was expected to study, work and be equal to men in all aspects of life.

Gender perceptions are changing, and this process is encouraging.?Recent studies confirm this idea: modern parents are beginning to take care of girls and boys equally. This is true for small children. But at the same time, we see specific signs of inequality between adolescent boys and girls. In India, boys are still more likely to be enrolled in private schools that require payment, while girls are more likely to be enrolled in free government-run schools. Girls are also more likely than boys to drop out of school to take care of their younger siblings.

There are more girls on our platform and we see that as a responsibility.?We're also trying to make sure that our content is gender sensitive. We show mothers working outside the home and fathers doing household chores. We show boys and girls in the same light. While boys are learning about emotions, girls are doing math and science.

Don’t be the best be the enemy of the good

It would be useful for tech and social entrepreneurs not to let the best be the enemy of the good.?The thing is, we learn a lot by taking something that was imperfect and iterating on it. So instead of trying to come up with the perfect solution in your head, it's more efficient to just decide what needs to be implemented. That's pretty much being humble enough to say, ‘This is good. Let's try to work on it’

My motto is: try to get 1% better every day.?Compounding percent is a miracle. In the next three years, I want to impact 5 million children across the country.

There are still not enough women entrepreneurs in tech.?Part of that is because women aren't visible enough. If a woman entrepreneur doesn't do well, the people around her often conclude that no woman entrepreneur will succeed. To all the women out there who are wondering if they can take the leap, I would just say, 'Of course you can, you're not alone’.

I'd like to ask all investors: please, fund women, champion them, give them space to make mistakes and grow without blaming their gender.?Half the world is still underrepresented right now. And hopefully we can change that.