Project Overview
In India, the ability to speak English opens the door to better career opportunities and aspirational jobs — especially for youth from low-income backgrounds. In a recent report, students who are proficient in English earn 23% more than those who are not. Because of its importance to employers, being able to speak English often gives young people more self-confidence and motivation.
Enguru, a live class and mobile application, makes learning English easier by offering affordable, community-based training. Through games and quizzes, the platform creates an interactive and fun training environment. Supporting 12 Indian languages, enguru leverages technology to help people learn English and improve their employability.
Teachers provide feedback personally to all students, which I feel is very helpful for working on my errors and where I am lacking.
Enguru Student
How it Helps
People from all walks of life use enguru to build skills: students, working professionals, homemakers, entrepreneurs, teachers of other subjects, and others looking for jobs. The platform’s technology powers a blended model where students can attend live virtual classes and practice on their own. This flexibility helps students shape their own learning pathway while receiving support from peers working toward the same goal. The average engagement level is 1.5 hours a day on the platform, which validates enguru’s approach and shows the investment of students.
Enguru offers basic English training along with functional English tailored for specific industries like business process outsourcing, retail, and hospitality. Its features like interactive group classes, leader boards, advanced speech recognition, and adaptive self-learning make it popular among users.
The platform’s certified teachers are experienced in building English-speaking capabilities in adults and children. A robust feedback mechanism in the app enables students to enter feedback immediately after a session or later on. The system automatically matches top-performing teachers to time slots with a high quantity of learners. As of August 2020, enguru’s platform has more than 170 teachers — seven times the amount employed at the start of the year.
A Vision to Transform Lives
The ability to speak English is more than aspirational — it can be a tool for families to break the cycle of poverty. It is especially transformational for young people seeking to enter the workforce and support their families. The creators of enguru understand this reality and built the platform to improve employability at scale for low-income youth in India.
Though 52% of enguru users are students and 55% are graduates of secondary school, the platform is also built to meet the needs of people from all backgrounds and ages with a variety of goals. Learning general English is most popular, but many people work toward more function-specific English proficiency to prepare for job interviews or improve their business. Enguru has wide appeal across India in both non-metro and metro states — 66% of its users are from outside Tier 1 cities in states like Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Karnataka, and Telangana.
In enguru, we see an example of how organizations can use technology to improve the lives of people at scale and help them reach their potential. For enguru users, the journey to English proficiency is one that fosters connection, self-discovery, and much more.