ShikshaLokam

Enabling enriching learning experiences for all children in India

India is home to 250 million school going children, for whom 4.5 million education leaders shoulder the responsibility of improving access and quality of education across 1.5 million schools. These education leaders are responsible for decisions ranging from administration of schools to pedagogy, often with limited resources / opportunities to build their own capabilities. In order to drive systemic transformation in education and improve educational outcomes of children, building the capacity of education leaders is essential.

About the organisation

ShikshaLokam's theory of action rests on a deceptively simple insight: leadership is not a position — it is the ability to drive continuous micro-improvements in one's own context. Their work is to make this possible, repeatable, and widespread for every education leader in India.

Khushboo Awasthi
COO
Ashoka Fellow, Schwab Social Innovator, Niti Aayog’s Women Transforming India Awardee

Headquarters: India
Geographies: India
Domains: Education

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Journey of Exponential Change

ShikshaLokam came to this journey in 2017 through a fundamental mindset shift in how it understood scale. Through its earlier work with Mantra4Change, the team observed a strong correlation between engaged school leadership and sustained school improvement.

The Big Quest:
How might we enable leadership across 1.5 million schools in India so that all children experience enriching learning?

They also challenged themselves by asking how do we solve at the scale of the challenge without growing the organisation.With a belief that simple ideas scale best, ShikshaLokam developed the micro-improvements approach to enable continuous, system-wide improvement.

Through partnerships with governments and 100+ civil society organisations, this approach has been embedded at scale. By contributing to the co-creation of DIKSHA as a DPI, and powering it through open digital public goods like Elevate, the model has been institutionalised through learning improvement programs across 15+ states, shaping both practice and policy towards decentralised, leader-driven change. At its core, ShikshaLokam made a deliberate choice: to distribute the ability to solve, unlocking leadership within the system rather than building parallel capacity outside it.

Today, this journey is evolving into Shikshagraha, a people’s movement for education equity. This network design expands the ecosystem to include self-help groups, hyperlocal community organisations, and youth networks, reframing education as a shared societal responsibility.

Their impact is both deep and wide - over 355,000 education leaders engaged, enabling 2.1 million+ micro-improvements across 27 states; and these have compounded to system-level shifts - improving school and classroom practices, strengthening student learning outcomes as reflected in PARAKH and National Achievement Survey results.