Chrysalis
Location
India
Sector
Education
Type of Investment
Risk Capital
Project Stage
Test & Transition
Length of Investment
2020+
Website
Investment Overview
Chrysalis is an early childhood education organisation targeting low-income children in India. Chrysalis has pioneered an innovative activity-based learning programme, keeping children and their development outcomes at the root of its work. Chrysalis focuses on four domains - cognitive, social, emotional, and metacognitive learning - using a holistic approach.
The Development Challenge
Public schooling for young children is not widely available in India, which has led to the development of low-cost Affordable Private Schools, where low-income families can send their children for a small fee. The infrastructure of such schools is deeply fragmented and informal, resulting in limited standardisation and overall poor quality of education delivery. The curriculum is often ill-suited and not conducive to learning for young children, impeding their cognitive and emotional development and failing to equip them with the essential skills necessary for them to go on and thrive in their education.
The Innovation
Chrysalis has developed age-appropriate, activity-based-learning that provides consistency and quality in Affordable Private Schools. The aim is to overcome the growing learning crisis in developing countries.
Our Investment
Chrysalis will use GIFs investment to expand their operations, continue to develop their product offering for affordable private schools, for example through increased digitisation, and to continue to refine their teacher development and school training initiative.
Investment Objective
Chrysalis takes its activity-based learning programme to affordable private schools (APS) in India and improves the classroom learning environment, teacher and management capacity and ultimately learning outcomes for students in the pre-primary and primary grades.
Why we invested
The main impact on GIF target beneficiaries is through the increased quality of affordable early childhood education for children from low-income families.
However, we also hope that in the long term, by formalising the market for education service providers serving the lower end of the market (Affordable Private Schools), GIF can unlock additional investment in the industry.
Chrysalis in numbers
Children reached in 2020 alone
Improvement in student engagement in Chrysalis partner schools
Chrysalis Impact Brief
In India, government provisioned early childhood education (before the age of 6 years or Grade 1) is often not widely available or not of the highest quality, which has created a market for private schools that charge nominal fees. These are known as “Affordable Private Schools”, and low-income families who value education immensely often send their children to these as soon as they can. An estimated 160,000 schools in urban areas alone fit into the category of Affordable Private Schools and provide low-income families with access to education, particularly of the early years kind, for their children. However, the setup of these schools is deeply fragmented and informal which causes limited standardisation and considerable variations in quality.
Chrysalis’ flexible, play-based approach with developmentally appropriate activities suited for supporting the development of young minds, combined with their teacher support, assessment, and management transformation is seeking to improve learning outcomes in these Affordable Private Schools. Based in India, Chrysalis has adopted an activity-based learning programme keeping children and their development outcomes at the core of its work. Chrysalis focuses on four domains – cognitive, social, emotional, and metacognitive learning, using a holistic approach. The curriculum covers all subjects all the way from nursery school through to kindergarten and primary Grades 1-6.
Chrysalis also assists and builds capacity of teachers, parents, and school administration through its learning transformation team, which, as the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted India, has proven critical to ensuring continuity in children’s learning and development, with an explicit focus on emotional support.
Early childhood education and development is critical as the brain matures faster and is the most malleable it will ever be in a child’s first five years. Supporting high quality early years education intervention is thus a key investment priority here at GIF.
Use of GIF Funds
GIF has invested $1.6m via equity to fund the expansion of Chrysalis’ activity-based learning programme in affordable private schools in India, thereby helping to deliver high quality early years education at an affordable cost. GIF funds will additionally help Chrysalis to develop new products, including technology-enabled blended learning solutions specifically for low resource settings, in order to further improve the accessibility, quality, and cost-effectiveness of their programme.
Investment Objectives
Chrysalis takes its activity-based learning programme to affordable private schools in India and improves the classroom learning environment, teacher and management capacity, and ultimately the learning outcomes for students in the pre-primary and primary grades. Specifically, it aims to:
Increase the proportion of APS schools and enrolled students receiving the activity-based programme as a proportion of overall partner schools.
Maintain operational and financial viability of the programme to make the model sustainable.
Improve the learning environment and outcomes in APS schools and establish M&E best practices to measure success; Chrysalis is harnessing the power of technology to establish student learning and developmental outcome measurement and enhancement.
Impact to Date
In the last 8 years, Chrysalis has reached over 300,000 students and 6,000 teachers across 800+ schools in India. In 2020 alone they worked with 730 schools reaching 270,000+ students, of which 359 can be classified as Affordable Private Schools. 121,000+ students received the Chrysalis curriculum.
Longitudinal data for Chrysalis partner schools has shown 12% improvement in student engagement, 19% improvement in school systems, 10% improvement in teachers as professionals and overall, and 12% improvement on its proprietary ‘School Transformation’ rubric over 3 years. Chrysalis is one of the partners for the mission-driven consulting firm FSG’s improving early childhood learning programme in India.