Bharti Airtel Foundation

Bharti Airtel Foundation is the philanthropic arm of Bharti Enterprises, set up in 2000 to work on education in India. Its stated vision is to help underprivileged children and youth across the country realise their potential. Its mission is to create and support programmes that drive sustainable change through education and the use of technology. Most of its work is in rural India, where it runs its own schools and also works with government schools to improve teaching and learning. It describes its approach as holistic, covering academic learning along with life skills, leadership, school environment and community involvement, and it works with state governments, education departments, corporations and local communities.

Headquarters: Gurgaon, Haryana, India

Major Areas of Work

• School education: Running its own schools for underprivileged children in rural areas, from primary to senior secondary level.

• Government school improvement: Working with partner government schools and state education departments on school leadership, teaching practice, student life skills and parent involvement.

• Teacher development: Free online training, courses and resources for teachers, and support for teacher-led action research through its national symposium, CONVOKE.

• Higher education access: Scholarships and institutional partnerships that help students from low-income families study at leading institutions.

• Community engagement: Student-led literacy and digital literacy campaigns and community volunteering linked to its schools.

Major Initiatives and Programmes

• Satya Bharti School Program: Launched in 2006, a network of primary, elementary and senior secondary schools built and managed by the Foundation for underprivileged children in rural India, with an emphasis on girls.

• Quality Support Program: Started in 2013 with state governments, it works with partner government schools on co-scholastic interventions under four pillars (school leaders and teachers, students, parents and community, and school environment), aiming to institutionalise these practices within 3 to 5 years.

• QSP State Partnerships: Provides technical and management support to state education departments to run the Quality Support Program at district and state scale, including training roadmaps, guidelines, monitoring and training for state and district resource groups.

• TheTeacherApp: A free teacher training platform launched in November 2024 on web, iOS and Android, offering self-paced courses including foundational literacy and numeracy, certificates on completion and AI tools for K-12 teachers.

• Bharti Airtel Scholarship: A merit-cum-means scholarship for first-year undergraduate and integrated engineering students at the top 50 NIRF-ranked institutes with family income up to INR 8 lakh a year, covering full tuition, hostel and mess fees and a laptop for up to five years, with an emphasis on girl students.

• Saksharta Bharti Abhiyan and Digital Saksharta Bharti Abhiyan: student led literacy and digital skills campaigns, including training more than 41,000 elders in safe digital practices, payments and cybersecurity.

• CONVOKE: a national research symposium where teachers present action research from their own classrooms.

Impact

Bharti Airtel Foundation has worked in rural India for more than 25 years. Its Satya Bharti School Program runs 147 schools reaching over 34,650 students and 1,200 teachers. Its Quality Support Program and State Partnerships together cover more than 34,000 schools, reaching close to 32 lakh students and over 1.6 lakh teachers across 12 states and union territories. TheTeacherApp has more than 3 lakh active users, and its Digital Saksharta Bharti Abhiyan has trained over 41,000 elders in digital safety and literacy.

Partners

NITI Aayog, District Administration of Ri Bhoi (Meghalaya), District Administration of Ferozepur (Punjab), SCERT Uttarakhand, Indian Army’s Northern Command (Army Goodwill Schools), partner government schools across multiple states

Leadership

• Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman

• Rakesh Bharti Mittal, Co-Chairman

• Nuriya Ansari, Chief Executive Officer

• Binu Nair, Chief Operating Officer

Bharti Airtel Foundation suits people who want to work on school education at scale. The work includes running its own schools in rural India, supporting government schools and state education departments, and building a digital platform for teachers. Staff work on direct delivery in schools and also on system-level work with state governments, inside an organisation backed by a large corporate group. It fits educators, programme managers, trainers and technologists who are comfortable working in rural settings and with government systems.