Scope of Work
Engagement of an EdTech and AI Consultant for the Education Programme
Background
ChildFund India works across 14 states on foundational literacy and numeracy, early childhood care and education, STEM learning, and adolescent development, reaching children through programmes such as PENCIL and SciXplore STEM Edge, alongside the Dream of Completing School programme for dropout children and the Udaan Fellows Programme. These programmes have grown steadily over the years, with strong field presence, government partnerships, and established assessment and training tools.
As the education sector moves rapidly towards digital and AI enabled learning, and as funding partners increasingly expect organisations to demonstrate digital readiness and innovation, ChildFund India recognises the need to strengthen this dimension of its education portfolio. The organisation is looking to bring in an experienced EdTech consultant to help shape a clear and practical pathway for integrating digital and AI elements into its education programmes.
About the Programmes
ChildFund India runs four education programmes, each shaped by years of field experience and its own approach to reaching children. PENCIL works on foundational literacy and numeracy, SciXplore STEM Edge builds STEM learning in government schools, DOCS brings dropout children back into education, and Udaan supports adolescent girls through higher education. The sections below describe each programme in detail.
PENCIL
PENCIL is ChildFund India's foundational learning programme, running across 14 states through more than 450 learning centres and reaching around 12,000 children annually. It addresses foundational literacy and numeracy through dedicated FLN hours, and builds the capacity of teachers and school management to support children's early learning. The programme also brings in a social emotional learning component, since PENCIL's experience shows that children's SEL grounding has a real bearing on how well they learn to read, write, and work with numbers. PENCIL shares a 21st century life skills component with the STEM programme, and uses the iPrep application, a tool that combines online and offline content with personalised, adaptive learning and quizzes to support children's FLN and STEM learning outcomes.
SciXplore STEM Edge
SciXplore STEM Edge works with children in grades 6 to 10 in government schools, with particular attention to girls, across 9 states, reaching more than 120 schools, 26,000 students, and 1,200 trained teachers. The programme is built around five components, namely infrastructure upgradation such as mini science labs, STEM libraries, and smart classrooms, teacher capacity building, 21st century skills training for children, learner support and exposure opportunities, and parent and community engagement. Alongside this, the programme runs its own internal baseline, midline, and endline assessments through the year to track STEM knowledge, skills, interest, and the broader school environment.
Dream of Completing School (DOCS)
DOCS is designed for children who have dropped out of school. It works through four connected steps, identifying dropout children in the community, supporting their enrolment or re enrolment into formal schooling, providing supplementary academic support so they can catch up on lost learning, and offering counselling to address the personal or family circumstances that often sit behind a child's dropout. Because DOCS deals with a more vulnerable and harder to reach group of children than programmes working with enrolled students, getting the identification and follow up right is especially important to its success.
Udaan Fellowship Programme
Udaan focuses on helping adolescent girls access higher education. The programme is built around five pillars, namely scholarship or financial support, mentorship, 21st century skills training, career counselling and guidance, and linkages for job oriented training, including exposure visits. Fellows typically stay with the programme over an extended period, receiving continuous support rather than a one time intervention, which makes consistent tracking of each fellow's journey an important part of how the programme is run.
Purpose of the Assignment
ChildFund India's education programmes have been built and strengthened over many years through steady field presence, deep community relationships, and close government partnerships. Each programme, PENCIL, SciXplore STEM Edge, DOCS, and Udaan, has its own well established approach, tools, and delivery model, as described above. What these programmes have not yet done in a structured way is bring in digital and AI elements, whether to strengthen how children learn, how facilitators and teachers are supported, how progress is tracked, or how programme information is documented and used.
At the same time, the broader education sector is changing quickly. Government systems, funding partners, and peer organisations are all moving towards digital and AI enabled approaches, and ChildFund India needs a credible, well thought through position on this rather than an ad hoc one. Bringing in a consultant at this stage is meant to help the organisation move deliberately, learning what is genuinely useful for its context and its children, rather than adopting technology for its own sake.
The purpose of this assignment, therefore, is to engage a high level EdTech and AI consultant, for a period of approximately six months, on a deliverables based basis, who can do three things together. First, understand each of the four programmes closely enough to see where digital or AI support would genuinely help, rather than proposing generic solutions. Second, translate that understanding into a practical roadmap and a set of specific, costed recommendations that ChildFund India can act on. Third, leave behind enough clarity and internal capacity that the Education team can carry these ideas forward confidently once the assignment ends, including in conversations with funders who are increasingly asking what the organisation is doing in this space.
Application Submission Process
- Interested consultants or consulting teams are requested to submit the following.
- A brief technical proposal outlining understanding of the assignment and proposed approach.
- A note on relevant past experience, with examples of similar work if available.
- A financial proposal linked to each deliverable listed in Section 6.
- CVs of the consultant or the consulting team members who will work on this assignment.
- Contact details of at least two references from similar past assignments.
Applications should be submitted to centralpurchase2@childfundindia.org no later than 31st August 2026.. Only shortlisted consultants will be invited for a presentation and discussion before committee