India runs large public day-care network with 1.37M Anganwadi centres (AWC) serving 30M 3–6-year-old children. Traditionally, AWCs focused only on supplementary nutrition, maternal health, or immunisation. Thanks to government policy changes and Rocket Learning’s work, the national agenda has changed and through age-appropriate pedagogy, play-based teaching/learning materials and upgrading the facilities, the “porridge centres” are becoming “vibrant centres of learning” as well.

As 90% of brain development happens by the age of 6, the pre-school stimulation results in better learning in school and higher educational attainment.

AWCs hold potential to reach 80M children from low-income households. Regardless the socio-economic background, Indian parents are most invested in their children’s future. How can we change their existing AWCs’ perception from "nutrition-only” to "nutrition and educational” and convince them, especially mothers with limited or no education, to enrol their children as they will do better later in school and life as well?

By the age of 3, children start being curious about the world and want to better understand what they see, hear, and do. Each question is one step forward in child’s learning. All the "whys" and other “illogically logical” questions find the parents at a loss for words and answers. However, when the answers are thoughtful and based on psychology and rational teaching techniques, they serve the child in a constructive manner and move them forward with their development.

At times when the AWC’s professional worker trained to deal with such questions is not at hand, rather than answering them just to silence the child or ignoring the questions altogether (which stifles that curiosity and desire for knowledge), AWC Parent Aid, a generative AI chatbot is here to help. Thanks to the workers’ access to the chats, they can later elaborate more on what each child is specifically interested in.

To reach the low-income parents in rural areas effectively, we will provide them with AWC Parent Aid on a platform they already use every day. Smart phones are ubiquitous with Reliance Jio being India’s largest telecom network. The company enjoys a great trust among users and high penetration among 18–35 years old mobile owners in rural areas.

We will partner with Jio and make AWC Parent Aid available in MyJio app, an app with over 500M downloads in India. We will launch the tool and promote it with PR campaign in radio, print and in-app communication, then spread the word through WhatsApp groups, ShareChat, partner with influencers to share their personal experience via YouTube Shorts or Facebook Reels and encourage people to share theirs too.

As an official AWC tool supporting children’s development, it will establish the Anganwadi centres as an education provider in general.

AWC Parent Aid is a ChatGPT API based chatbot fine-tuned and trained with specific psychological and teaching training dataset focused on pre-school children development. Thanks to the custom data, AWC Parent Aid is contextually aware and accustomed to talking and engage with pre-school children in an educational manner and in a way they can understand. Moreover, based on the interactions, the AI is constantly learning and adapting to the child’s actual needs, age, or phase of development. Since the chatbot is text-prompting only, it is very low data friendly.

Even though this tool will never replace the interpersonal connection and social aspect of attending the AWCs, it is an easily and widely accessible tool for parents when the AWC workers are not at hand. And as soon as they are, thanks to their access to the chats, they can later elaborate more on what each child is specifically interested in.