$1 provides 2 days of access to a Yellow Room for a child, to set them up for success and enhance what they learn in school. (Children typically spend 4 hours per day in Yellow Rooms, on top of their regular school schedule.) 

More details about how your donation will be used are here.

Sarthak’s founder, Kshama Hastak, is a former professor who started the organization as a passion project before leaving her job to pursue the work full-time.  She brings 18 years of experience in corporate and academic environments, combined with a deep passion for improving the lives of children.  

You can see more details on the rest of the team here; their deep commitment is clear from the fact that almost all of the full-time staff started out as volunteers.  Sarthak’s advisory board are deeply experienced senior leaders with corporate, academic, technical and operational experience.

Yes, they are clearly documented in Sarthak’s activity reports! 

Mission: Provide children from disadvantaged backgrounds equitable platforms of education, socio-emotional connections and physical-psychological well-being.

Vision: Happy Empowered Children in socio-economic disadvantaged groups

Values: Integrity, Relationships

Sarthak’s model is a fresh twist on the classic approach to kids’ education. Rather than just trying to get kids to go to school, Sarthak brings schooling to them, building micro-community centers that reinvigorate life in their communities. 

There are many components to Sarthak’s solution, but we believe they’re all essential and we haven’t found any unnecessary complexity. We love how Sarthak leverages external resources (like Khan Academy) to deliver impact as efficiently as possible.

Yellow Rooms are highly scalable in theory, but the organization hasn’t yet proven its ability to scale beyond Uttar Pradesh.  That said, the scale of the problem in India (8 million children under the age of 6 living in informal settlements), and the size of Uttar Pradesh’s population (more than 230 million), leaves plenty of room to scale.

When expanding to new locations, Sarthak takes a nimble prototyping approach, testing out the relationship and building rapport with the community before investing fully in setting up a facility (more detail is on their website).

The project cannot generate self-sustaining revenue and will require ongoing donations. Sarthak is committed to providing education free of charge for those who can afford it least, so establishing self-generating capabilities isn’t currently possible.

There isn’t currently a plan to develop self-sustaining capabilities. 

Sarthak did explore the possibility of having parents pay a small amount for their children to attend, and this model is used in another project that Sarthak runs. However, when they tried charging fees in Yellow Rooms (even as little as $1 per month), it disproportionately hurt girls, whose families didn’t want to pay for their education, and so they set this idea aside.

In this case, reversal could be defined as children dropping out of school, or children receiving education that does not help improve their lives in the long run (e.g. it doesn’t help them gain employment, lift themselves and their families out of poverty, or break addiction cycles).

Sarthak has proven that they have a powerful and lasting solution, with a drop out rate of less than 3%. It’s especially impressive that during the COVID lockdowns, this rate did not change, and no girls dropped out! (Click here to learn more about their creative COVID interventions.)  

We do not yet have substantial long-term information on how children fare after graduating out of Sarthak’s programs.  Only 9 children have reached graduation age so far, because they were about 6-7 years old when Sarthak started. Some of those young adults are now doing internships, and some have enrolled in higher education.

Sarthak makes their financial statements readily available on their website, including detailed audited balance statements, to comply with Indian regulations for NGO’s. A sample budget for a Yellow Room can be found here.

Sarthak releases monthly activity reports, which recap key metrics such as the number of children served, and highlights impact stories.  Sarthak has also started conducting impact assessments, which help monitor the impact they’re having and more carefully calibrate their activities to optimize outcomes for the children and their communities.

Sarthak will share images and updates weekly during an active campaign, and monthly after the campaign until the funds we raised are used up. In addition, Sarthak’s monthly activity reports capture highlights across all of their projects.  

Founded in 2013, Sarthak is 9 years old. 

Since 2013, Sarthak has reached 2,700 children through their Yellow Rooms and rural school; 55% of these children are girls. 

Across all of their programs they have served 5100 children (with a total of 20,400 indirect beneficiaries, e.g. family members).

The organization is very effective at getting kids back into school: when a Yellow Room is established in an urban community, 95% of the children will enroll in formal schooling if they haven’t already (read more here). While Sarthak has a deep and lasting impact, Sarthak’s size is still relatively small compared to the scale of the problem.

(Updated December 2022)

Sarthak’s Yellow Rooms have been operational for 9 years, since 2013.

Much of Sarthak’s curriculum leverages well-established teaching methodologies that have been proven internationally, including the British Council Curriculum, Khan Academy, and CASEL.

Sarthak’s core values are integrity (which they define as making a deep and lasting impact) and relationships. We’ve seen this deeply ingrained throughout the organization’s operations and decisions; all the employees clearly live these values. You can read more about how these values show up in Yellow Rooms here.

Sarthak’s long-term dream is to have a Yellow Room in every slum in India, but at this stage it's not clear how much it would cost or when it would be possible to cover India’s 49,000 slums.

In the near term, they aim to have their Yellow Room programs reach 5,000 children by 2025.  Across all their programs, they are aiming to serve 10,600 children by 2024.

Sarthak sees their “big goal” not just as how many lives they’ve touched, but the depth of the impact for each child. This means helping them live happy and dignified lives, get jobs, and ultimately break the cycle of poverty. 

Supporting 5,000 children through Yellow Rooms will cost 50 million rupees (about $600,000) per year.

$1 provides 2 days of education for a child. It also ensures that the child has access to physical materials (stationery, bag, uniform, shoes, socks, clothes) and nutrition that they need to stay happy, healthy and focused.

Amongst other metrics, Sarthak measures and reports childrens’ improvements in: communication, scientific and mathematical skills; awareness of gender; enrollment in school; attendance rates; physical and mental health; and leadership in the community.

While it’s easy to quantify the short-term effects on children’s learning and health, some of the longer-term effects (e.g. reduced poverty, increased employability) are harder to measure and Sarthak is working to build this capability.

Sarthak has recently formalized a monitoring and evaluation team that releases impact assessment reports. These reports capture quantitative metrics (e.g. children’s academic performance overall and in specific subjects, gender-disaggregated), as well as qualitative metrics (like results of focus group discussions with parents that capture the quality of the impact that Sarthak is having). They conduct baseline tests of all incoming students to make sure they can place them in appropriate learning groups and assess their academic progress.

Lack of education is a key factor that keeps families trapped in poverty for generations. By providing education and helping kids become employable, Sarthak addresses a root cause of poverty. They help children lift themselves, their families, and their communities out of poverty. 

Sarthak’s focus on preventing child marriage is especially important for tackling poverty.  Educated girls tend to wait longer to have children, and have less kids overall. This makes it easier to support their families with education and better opportunities.

The project cannot generate self-sustaining revenue and will require ongoing donations.

One concern with solutions such as Sarthak’s, is that they risk removing pressure on the government to improve the quality of public education.  We don’t see this as a serious risk; Sarthak works with government schools in a couple of ways, including a new pilot that they’re running together. Most children go to private or government schools for their formal education (with the exception of remote rural areas where there are no nearby schools). Sarthak employees attend parent-teacher meetings, so they’re able to continue advocating for change within the existing government school system.

Integrating into the local populations is a critical part of Sarthak’s approach.  Yellow Rooms undertake community outreach and parent counseling activities to establish long-lasting roots in the communities. Sarthak focuses especially on forming strong relationships with the children’s parents. By taking education and emotional wellness to families’ doorsteps, Sarthak actually becomes part of the community. 

We think that in the future Sarthak could explore ways for the community to take even more ownership of these spaces and put more “skin in the game”, e.g. by having community members volunteer to help with operations or sit on governing boards.

Our vetting has uncovered no negative influences on indigenous populations.

Education has a long-lasting positive impact that typically cascades across multiple generations.  According to UNESCO, “education lights every stage of the journey to a better life, especially for the poor and most vulnerable. Education empowers girls and young women, in particular… and it boosts their children’s chances of leading healthy lives.”  Educated girls tend to be healthier, get married later, have fewer children, and provide better health care and education for their children, with lasting benefits across future generations.

One potential negative consequence is the risk of teaching children mindsets – like gender equality – that aren’t yet widely accepted in their context and can make communities feel threatened. These ideas can be difficult for others in their families or communities to accept - especially issues related to gender equality (e.g. that girls and boys require the same nutrition).

In Sarthak’s words, “we understand that many of these children come from very conservative backgrounds. So whatever shift happens (in their thinking around gender awareness, etc.) has to happen very mildly.  If it is too strong, parents will not want to send their children to Yellow Rooms or to school.”  Sarthak teaches children not to be aggressive when they have these types of conversations, and to engage in a very collaborative way. Children practice discussing these issues with a non-confrontational approach, using de-escalation tactics.

Families that have small businesses often want to have their children around to help out (e.g. in the family’s shop) whenever they can. Sarthak has heard from some of these families that it causes strain to have their children in school.  On balance, we believe that the long-term benefits of having their children educated (e.g. the increased future earning and employment potential) outweigh the short-term losses from not having the kids around to help.  

Sarthak’s goal, to offer 5,000 children quality education and a path out of poverty, is particularly audacious because of the depth of the impact.  Sarthak cares deeply about helping kids become emotionally-intelligent and resilient leaders in their communities.  They are fiercely commited to making sure every child stays in the program, graduates high school, and finds a well-suited job. This includes help choosing a career path, technical training, internships, or support to get into (and pay for) college. Sarthak’s goal goes beyond just education, to making sure they do everything within their power to ensure these young people thrive in work and life. 

This is a massive and complex challenge.  We recognize that there are many organizations doing great work in poverty alleviation in India, and that many are struggling to find scalable, affordable, and long-lasting interventions that can really move the needle on the problem. Sarthak’s approach of getting education to those who need it most, and thereby providing a path out of poverty for them and their families, is succeeding where many others have struggled. 

We’ve been impressed with Sarthak’s sensitive and agile approach to responding to needs as they emerge, e.g. bringing new materials into the curriculum when gaps or opportunities are identified. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sarthak demonstrated exceptional agility and creativity, designing interventions to ensure that children, and especially girls, didn’t drop out of school (read more here).

The global quest to end poverty has suffered major setbacks in recent years, and the situation is getting increasingly desperate for India’s poorest communities, who are disproportionately impacted by climate change.  Once impoverished, communities can get trapped in the cycle of poverty for generations, and interventions to break the cycle are urgently needed. 

In Sarthak’s words, “We need to start now because education is not the kind of thing that happens in a year. It takes years for a child to become educated, and our work deeply changes their personality. The earlier we start, the better it is – so that we can shape them into young people who are contributing to their families and the economy, and so that they can move out of poverty and break the cycle.”