About Us

We engage with and mentor young talented learners – handholding them and their parents along individual learning pathways leading to their chosen destinations and towards dreams of a brighter future.

As per the NEP 2020, India is facing a learning crisis with a large proportion of young learners experiencing poor learning outcomes despite disproportionate spends on education. Parents, dreaming of a brighter future for their children, strain to meet education and remedial tuition expenses out of scarce disposable incomes. Poor learning outcomes at the school-level, result from structural issues relating to classroom learning, compounded by the inability of such groups of learners and importantly their parents to bridge the gap by effective home or out of school learning.

The magnitude of the problem is underlined by the fact that nearly 120mn learners are enrolled in 450,000 private schools with 70% of them paying less then Rs 1000 per month in fees. An equal number of learners is enrolled in Govt. schools where the financial impact is somewhat mitigated.
Many volunteer agencies and passionate individuals have long recognised these deficiencies and have been actively mentoring students to help them grow. These agencies have largely focused on improving the learning outcomes in Govt. schools and are adequately funded by grants from large foundations and Govt.budgets. But very few volunteer agencies work to improve learning outcomes in affordable private schools (annual tuition fees <Rs20000). These schools are akin to commercial shops dispensing low quality learning that is enormously damaging to hapless learners, pushing them many years behind.

The silver lining is that there are many individual mentors who voluntarily handhold such neglected learners through interventions across a wide variety of fields – focussed on vertical subjects, student segments, particular geographies, health interventions etc.based on their individual resources, preferences and capabilities. Mentors are drawn from diverse backgrounds, yet the exceptional ones are united by their passion and commitment to making a difference. Have we not all encountered a kind hearted educated retiree spotting a keen young talented learner needing help and jumping in to start helping that child. The satisfaction from this small act of kindness provides the impetus for mentoring an expanded group of children. While these efforts are very helpful, given the scale of the problem and the enormity of the effort required, much more needs to be done to help India’s future citizens become well educated, confident and ready for the challenges & opportunities of our fast growing economy and rapidly transforming world.

An informal survey confirmed that while there are a large number of active individual mentors across India, they lack a common platform or support agency. Most mentors therefore work on their own with little or no formal support or recognition.  Their work & guidance to mentees is limited by their own ‘band-width’. Often, the financial demands of such work limits their contributions. Addressing the limitations of relatively isolated individual mentors by connecting them using a secure, easy to use platform, will further unleash their great potential.

NextStep has undertaken to reach out to empower such mentors to empower them and amplify their efforts to enable them to make a much larger social impact.