Story Anganwadi: A modular approach for early education and health care for children and mothers.

Early childhood, universally defined to be from birth to age eight, is a stage when brain development is at its peak, and when children are highly influenced by the environment around them.

Early Childhood Care and Education or Foundational Learning aim toward the holistic development of a child’s emotional, cognitive, and physical needs in order to build a solid and broad foundation for lifelong learning and wellbeing. Thereby nurturing caring, capable, and responsible future citizens.

Some of the skills that foundational learning strives to teach include concentration, visual and auditory perception, short-term and long-term memory, reasoning and logical thinking, and fine and gross motor coordination among others.

Over the past two decades, India has seen the percentage of its children enrolled in school increase exponentially to become the largest education system in the world, however, today it is in the midst of a Learning Crisis where a large percentage of children enrolled in primary school are failing to attain even basic skills such as foundational literacy and numeracy.

The Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER) and the National Achievement Survey(NAS ) reiterate this, identifying foundational learning to be the most critical gap.

At the same time, the national level Integrated Child Development Services (offering education and health care services for children aged six and their mothers) is unable to deliver expected results, with gaps having been found to be at the early education level.

Can design offer a solution?

Could it bring in an increased sense of inclusiveness and community thereby increasing participation? Could well design spaces help achieve the goal of improving learning outcomes?

Would economically sustainable options mean implementation on a larger scale, and in turn more reach?

Can this model be replicated all across the country?

Design Challenge: Design a compact, modular unit which hosts an early education and health care program (pre-school) for children and their mothers.

The jury for the competition consisted of esteemed designers, professionals, and academicians from around the world. The Lead Jurors for the competitions were as follows:

Manoj Patel, Principal Architect, Manoj Patel Design Studio, India

Meeta Jain, Founder/Chief Architect, Meeta Jain Architects, India

Zach Poole, Senior Associate, MBB Architects, United States

Some of the Best of competition projects are:

Winning Project: GRASSROOT- ANGANWARI

By: Ananya Biswas

Description: Anganwari - Angina, an approach to the development of a flexible modular prototype to strengthen the future human resource. Our project aims the provision of amalgamation of sustainable, framed structure and passive design strategies.

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People’s Choice: Sparsh

By: Yash Singhi, Kishan Daga & Srushti Bagalkoti