Social Issue

India is the largest education market in the world with over 400 million children but it is estimated that over 30% of school-aged children are not enrolled in any school at all and around 30% attend private schools. Public schools tend to be overcrowded, understaffed, and suffer high levels of teacher absenteeism. Parents from lower-income families are willing to invest their limited incomes into private education due to these problems in the state sector. The affordable private school sector serving low-income families lacks adequate infrastructure and is unable to access finance from the formal financial sector.

Our Response

Varthana is a Bangalore-based Non Bank Finance Company (NBFC) that aims to improve the quality of education available to low-income Indian youth by providing much-needed investment capital to the Affordable Private School segment. Varthana also runs two initiatives focused on uplifting the quality of education: (1) the Beyond Loans programme, which aims to help schools obtain tools and services to improve the quality of education, and (2) the School Transformation programme which organises school quality assessments and improvements.

Expected Social Impact

We hope that more than 129,000 students can enjoy better services and higher educational quality as a result of this investment.