How we work

  • Tanmoy Samanta
    Associate Batch 2017

    Azim Premji Foundation motivates you to immerse yourself from your own experience to appreciate a continuous and experiential learning process. Since the beginning of my professional journey, I have been given challenging opportunities to work with teachers and develop understanding of education, school and society. Azim Premji Foundation work culture has also influenced my personal growth immensely and encouraged me to look deeper in every aspect of education to contribute constructively for its betterment.

  • Antara Panda
    Associate Batch 2018

    The Associate program has proved to be the best platform for me as an employee. The full one year journey has been a journey of learning. This program has played a very important part in development of my personal life as well, in addition to my career. Being a student of Science, developing my skills in basics of Language and Mathematics has been very interesting. The democratic setup of learning and performance has been a new experience for me.

  • Pritam Gupta
    Associate Batch 2015

    The foundation is not just a career option, it is one of the fewest organization which allows you to grow not only as a professional but also as an individual. The journey has been amazing, and I take pride to be associated with such a profession and able to contribute for such noble cause.  

  • Praveen Uniyal
    Associate Batch 2016

    Foundation gives ample opportunities to explore Education, primarily the public education system and its teachers, being utterly integral to the system. This happens through field experiences, internal capacity enhancement workshops and formal or informal discussions. The values, vision and work culture enable a conducive environment of learning to grow and evolve with optimism towards change while being critically reflective and thus contributing to teacher professional development.

  • Kalpana Bisht 
    Associate Batch 2018

    The year in the foundation has been a fertile ground to test what we have read and learnt as theory in our classrooms. It gives ample opportunities to explore, think and reflect on not only education but each and every aspect that we see in the society.

  • Alok Singh
    Associate Batch 2016

    The journey of the Associate program gave me a good exposure to the kind of efforts being made in different contexts for improving the quality of education in our country.

There are four essential components to our work:

Developing Talent

Develop a critical mass of people with vision, competence and deep motivation to engage in social action. This includes developing fresh talent (the Azim Premji University has been set up for this purpose) and building capacity in the existing talent (through District Institutes).

Developing Institutions

Establish strong field-level institutions in the most disadvantaged districts of India. The field institutes create avenues for the continuing professional development of teachers and education officials. They also work to reform school curriculum, teacher-education curriculum and related issues of education policy.

Developing Knowledge

Create knowledge and evidence through research to address the challenges in education and development in the Indian context. In many of the states, the Foundation is engaged in large scale educational research work that will create new knowledge and also support evidence based policy making.

Building Social Pressure

Strong networking, advocacy and communications act as a multiplier to facilitate change. We engage with the state and central governments, with the community, NGOs and industry to build positive social pressure for change.

Operating Principles

A number of key principles inform our strategy and approach.

  • Education and other allied domains
    Education is a powerful vehicle for social change and it is the primary focus of our work. It also has a large positive multiplier effect on other aspects of human life. Related domains like health, nutrition, livelihoods, governance and ecology have a critical bearing on education. However, we realize that it is not possible for a single organization to work with equal intensity and focus in all these areas and we therefore we calibrate our efforts based on the nature of the specific challenges, our own capabilities and our ability to work with partners and extended resources.
  • Operating organization
    We are both an Operating and Grant making organization. The Philanthropy makes grants.
  • At Scale
    All our work is aimed at creating large scale impact either directly or indirectly. We believe that in a large, complex and diverse country like India, small-scale, intense work in narrow pockets is unlikely to create any significant impact on the system.
  • Partnership with Government
    We seek systemic change and work primarily for India’s large underprivileged and marginalized population. Such system wide change which touches the large underprivileged population of India is possible only by working in close partnership with the government. However, we seek to supplement the work of the government and not substitute it.
  • Integrate theory and practice
    Our “academia” and “practice” teams work together synergistically. While knowledge through research is critical it must be deeply rooted in practical ground realities, for applicability.

Values

Our values describe our cultural ethos creating an ethically strong organization. Our four values are:

  • Contribute to social change
  • Ownership for significant lasting impact
  • Treat each person with respect
  • Act with unyielding integrity and courage