Hippocampus’s journey in delivering educational outcomes provides many insights on how such impact may be created in a commercial framework. Our journey is a definitive case study of a pioneering commercial venture addressing a huge social need.
Hippocampus assists private schools and community centres in running better schools, pre-schools and libraries. These programs have been implemented across India and the world through our partners.
The Hippocampus journey started in 2003 with a library for children in Koramangala, a suburb of Bangalore. Hippocampus was started, by Umesh Malhotra and Vimala R Malhotra, to satiate their son's appetite for books. The library captured the imagination of Bengalurean's and quickly became a part of the cultural landscape of the city.
They decided to expand their work with libraries for children studying in government schools and small private schools. Their program GROW BY Reading was a super hit, and before they knew it was being implemented in libraries from Ladakh to Tiruvannamalai. The program is available from Hippocampus in the languages of English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil and Urdu. Room to Read has adopted this program as their standard and is using it internationally.
Hippocampus embarked on the next phase of its journey in 2011 with preschool centres across rural Karnataka. The venture found ready acceptance in the villages they opened in. The number of centres ramped up rapidly and by 2014, Hippocampus was operating more than 100 preschool centres.
The parents of the preschool centres wanted the same quality of education into the primary years. In response, Hippocampus started
K-10 schools in rural India and by 2020, Hippocampus was operating 16 schools.
Covid was brutal, leading to the closure of many of these preschools and schools and there was significant scale back. This also gave us a time to reflect and redefine our learning to go beyond knowledge and focus on behaviours and competencies in children. Hippocampus schools are now well-poised to make children from rural India, 21st century citizens.
Hippocampus calls their schools 7C schools and has set an aggressive goal of 500 schools over the next decade. It intends to have operations as big as the country of Finland, and offer similar quality outcomes, at 10% of the cost of Finland.
We work with young children, and there is no bigger joy than a smile on a child’s face. This is the single motivating and unifying factor for all our team members –from the teachers to their managers and the team at the head office. We have a diverse team from different geographies and socio-economic and educational backgrounds; however, all of us will give an arm and a leg to make sure each child is safe and learning joyfully.
Address
525, 16th Main Rd, Koramangala 3 Block, Koramangala, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560034
Contacts
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +91 63669 68336
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