Pratham Houston raises USD 700,000 for literacy in India

Around 750 Indian-Americans attended the Pratham Houston fundraising event in which the money was raised for its mission which is to "Imagine an India where every child can read".

Pratham USA, founded in Houston in 1998, has earned kudos for its yoeman's service towards education and innovative ways of reaching and raising the standards of education for the downtrodden children in India and for making it a household name globally.

Pratham Houston has launched a new initiative to reach out to Young Professionals by raising awareness about Pratham among Young Professionals.

Driven by its mission to ensure that every child is in school and learning, Pratham is reaching millions of children in rural and urban areas through a range of education interventions.

Read India, Pratham's flagship programme, has become a nationwide movement and works with communities, parents and governments to ensure that children between the age group of 6-14 have grade appropriate reading, writing and arithmetic skills.

Pre-schools for underprivileged children, outreach programmes targeting street children, special courses focused on such subjects as computers and english, remedial education for students not performing at grade-level and for out-of-school children.

Vocational and skill training to prepare students for the employment. So far 34 million children in more than 304,000 villages across 19 states in India have been reached by phase 1 of Read India. 448,000 volunteers and 605,000 teachers have been trained in Pratham's innovative techniques.

Around 700,000 children in 16,000 villages tested by Pratham's (Annual Status of Education Report) have resulted in the Indian government taking action with a revealing national picture of learning levels. 39,000 children have been schooled in Pratham pre-schools.

Over 20,000 children were taught to speak and read English. Over 16,000 children attended scholarship classes.

Recently, Pratham's Madhav Chavan received a 2011 Skoll Foundation Social Entrepreneurship Award which carried a USD 1,235,000 grant to Pratham to fund leadership training.

In 2009, Pratham was named the CNN Indian of Year in the Public Service Category.
President of the Houston, Chapter, Sonu Anand, thanked the individual donors and organisational sponsors for their support to the organisation.

She said, "Pratham Houston not only survive but thrive with your help and support for the cause of eliminating childhood illiteracy in India".