Esper Partners with 'Teach for India' and 'iTeach Schools' to Bring Education to Rural Kids

Android Device Management Platform, Esper, announced its partnership with two non-profit organizations, Teach for India and iTeach Schools, this month. Both the NGO's run large scale programmes impacting over thousands of school kids in India. Through these partnerships, Esper will assist both the e-learning providers to streamline the deployment and management of low cost Android tablets.

The pandemic has hit children from lower income households the most, severely affecting their access to education and increasing the risk of dropping out. The Annual Status of Education Report 2020 found that with the suspension of physical classes since the lockdown in March, there was a marked rise in students not being enrolled, either because they dropped out, or because it was not possible to get admitted. And according to UNESCO the number of children impacted in India may be as high as 320 million.

Organizations like Teach for India and iTeach are doing valuable work in this area to bridge the gap and ensure that millions of students do not miss out on their education. Experts are suggesting a hybrid solution of partial reopening of schools and online learning as a practical solution to the crisis. Esper's partnership with these non-profit organizations provides the much needed educational aids to make this possible.

"At Esper we are committed to partnering with global non-profits to bridge the digital divide in education. Millions of low income kids worldwide are unable to continue education due to COVID-related school closures. We are actively working with Android device makers, education content providers and non-profits to resume education for thousands of children worldwide," said Shiv Sundar, COO Esper.

Through Esper's partnership with Teach for India and iTeach, more than 10,000 kids are learning from home. iTeach and TFI reach out to remote locations of India and Esper is happy to be their device management partners and hope to scale.

The Teach for India Fellowship is an opportunity for India's brightest youth from the nation's best universities and workplaces, to serve as full-time teachers to children from low-income communities in under-resourced schools. Esper's solutions for Teach for India include deploying compliance policies seamlessly using zero touch functionality, remote viewing the tablets for troubleshooting and streamlining the tablet's functionality to only approved apps as well as preventing students from deleting them.

"In order to cope with the Pandemic and ensure that our students wouldn't miss out or fall behind, we procured 10,000 devices with an aim to use them for blended learning once the schools resumed. We required an MDM partner that would help us to restrict usage to educational apps, track our devices and enable our teachers to monitor the students usage of the devices. Esper won us with their intuitive interface, ease of enrollment and their constant hands-on support. So far, we have successfully enrolled almost 7000 of our devices and deployed over 3500 devices to our students who needed the devices the most. Esper has allowed us to seamlessly enroll all devices through the Zero-Touch Enrollment method while ensuring no device is outside the system," said Hitesh Rawtani, Director, Technology, Teach for India.

iTeach Schools, on the other hand, is a network of free, high quality secondary schools, serving 1600 students from the lowest income communities of Pune and Delhi across 9 schools, with a mission to empower them towards college, career and citizenship. Esper enables tablets with pre-configured security policies to be shipped directly to the students. The tablets will also include intelligent alerts, like battery or WIFI alerts and seamlessly deploy applications to the tablets from Esper cloud. The functionality of the tablet will also be restricted to only display I-Teach approved apps and blacklist all others.

"We at iTeach, like many other educational organizations, also had to shift to an online mode since the lockdown. Therefore, having a secured and dedicated device became an imminent need for all our students. Esper has helped us meet this need for all our students. With Esper's MDM solution, we have been able to keep a track of all the devices we have on-boarded. The last seen feature is particularly handy as it lets us know the frequency of the use of the device. Many of our donors, especially those donating tablets, feel much safer funding us since the Esper's MDM solutions safeguards our students," said Rashmi Pahade, Operations Manager, iTeach Schools.

As the Pandemic has furthered the role of digitization across globally, Esper has been at the forefront of pioneering practical Android Devops solutions across industries to combat COVID-19. Earlier this year, Esper announced a Telehealth Update, which would enable healthcare organizations and solutions providers to remotely connect with their patients on Esper managed Android devices to perform initial triage before they are asked to visit the hospital. "Social responsibility is a core value at Esper and this helps define how the brand approaches business. We believe that when people work together toward a shared goal it can become a key differentiator. Esper was founded to streamline Android innovation with the hope of serving a greater purpose," adds Vishranth, Director & Head of Sales & Partnerships - APAC, Esper.