Getting students future-ready and employable

Ragini Bajaj Chaudhary gets involved and intense when she talks about education, learning outcomes and employability. As Chief Executive officer of Gray Matters Capital India, the Indian arm of the US-headquartered impact investment firm Gray Matters Capital, she will be focussing her energies on the education sector.

Identifying start-ups to be put through an accelerator, investing in early-stage ventures and creating a pipeline of enterprises in the sector for other funds to invest in, and working to improve the overall ecosystem for start-ups in the sector top her agenda.

Gray Matters Capital, she says, has always been an ecosystem player. When it earlier focussed on micro-finance, it invested a lot in building self-regulatory organisations and industry bodies and also invested in ventures. “That is exactly what we want to do in education and employability,” she says.

Critical issues

On the education sector, says Ragini, they zeroed in on two critical issues. One was the employability crisis and the other was, how qualified students were for handling 21st century jobs, what with Artificial Intelligence and machine learning gaining prominence. “At one level,” she adds, “our present generation is not ready for present day jobs. They are definitely not ready for the future. Then we started thinking about 21st century skills which would help them be ready for whatever the future has in store.”

The skills for the future are about adaptability, communication, collaboration, critical thinking and problem solving. Gray Matters Capital also looked at other issues confronting the education sector – content, teacher development, defining who a customer in the education sector is, and the availability of funds that would invest in the education ventures.

Focus on two pillars

“We looked at these ecosystem gaps, both in the education and the investing sector and devised our strategy around it,” says Ragini. Gray Matters Capital decided to focus on two pillars – one was improving the learning outcomes and the other was employability. Apart from skills for the future, the company also looked at the issue from a gender prism. Education is gender neutral and ventures in the education space never looked at whether girls learn differently or maybe some subjects need to be taught differently for girls. For example, one of the companies Gray Matters has invested in, Chrysalis, does a gender audit of its curriculum.

According to Ragini, the first gap that they noticed was lack of a credible pipeline of ventures for investing. So, Gray Matters Capital created edLABS, which invites applications three-four times a year for early-stage investing, of around ₹100 lakh ($150,000), for breakthrough ideas in education. For this, it set aside $8 million, with the idea of funding at least 50 ventures in three years.

Investment strategy

The next strategy is a $2-million commitment into an accelerator to create a pipeline of ventures for future investing. The next is to invest in funds – as it did in the IAN Fund – and a direct investment in start-ups on its own. Gray Matters Capital is also helping schools associations come up with a quality charter as part of its ecosystem development focus. Gray Matters has committed $40 million over the next three years for all its initiatives. Ragini says Gray Matters will continue to focus on the education and employability issues for the next couple of years. It will also help enterprises connect with ecosystem players.

“Replication is an important part of our strategy. Right now we are looking to take the Indian School Finance model to other geographies, like Africa. We feel that is an entry point which will help us take other products along and if there are interesting ideas elsewhere, we could bring them here. It would gather steam next year,” says Ragini. For instance, she says, Gray Matters has supported the replication of Hippocampus model in Mexico. It is also working towards facilitating the replication of a Colombian company called Aulas Amigas for its teacher training solution in India.

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