An Evaluation of Mother Tongue-Based Early Learning and Parents+ Programme

The Mother Tongue-Based Early Learning and Parents+ Programme ran from 2016 to 2021 (having been extended due to the Covid-19 pandemic) in the state of Odisha, India – a partnership of the state government’s Department of Women and Child Development, Mission Shakti and the Bernard van Leer Foundation.

The programme scaled up a model of mother tongue-based multilingual early childhood education across 7,202 Anganwadi centres covering 10 tribal languages.

The evaluation finds that it succeeded in building the skills of frontline workers and managers to engage communities and parents and ease the transitions of children from tribal backgrounds to the formal schooling system. Based on these positive findings, the state government is scaling up the programme to the state’s entire 70,000+ Anganwadis.