Chairman of the Varkey Foundation, Vikas Pota, joins Alberto Lidji to discuss the Global Teacher Prize, Ed-Tech and universal access to quality education.
Vikas is passionate about quality education, advocacy, education technology (Ed-Tech) and political engagement. The Varkey Foundation is the driving force behind the Global Teacher Prize, which awards $1 million every year to an outstanding teacher.  They have made five annual awards thus far.
Moreover, the Varkey Foundation also convenes key stakeholders via their high-profile Global Education & Skills Forum in Dubai, where last year around 50 education ministers from around the world were in attendance.  
The $1 million award was presented by the well-known actor, Hugh Jackman, and is aimed at inspiring and increasing the status of teachers in every country. 
Advocacy is key and Vikas feels the philanthropy sector does a terrible job at communicating.  As a sector he feels there’s a need to step up and ask how do we capture people’s imagination – “communication is critical to everything that we do”.
The Varkey Foundation is a global foundation, which has been around for approximately 10 years. They’ve gone from being a CSR arm of GEMS Education, to being a corporate foundation and, now, to being a family foundation. 
Internationally, they engage with policymakers and key stakeholders on the ground. In Argentina, for instance, they have implemented a leadership and innovation program where nearly 6,000 school principals and directors have taken the course themselves – this is in partnership with five provinces in Argentina and Vikas notes it has been hugely successful.  
When asked whether ‘workforce’ was one of the key problems, Vikas replied that in the UK for example there is a recruitment and retention crisis. Teachers don’t want to stay in the job. UN Sustainable Development Goal Number 4 focuses on the provision of a quality education for all – Vikas notes it requires the recruitment of an additional 69 million new teachers to deliver SDG4 globally. 
While at Davos a few years back, Vikas had a discussion on whether teachers would be replaced by robots. Encouragingly, he notes the conclusion was that teachers’ jobs would not be replaced by robots – and that’s why it’s important to invest in capacity building for the teaching profession. However, Vikas recognises the tremendous potential of deploying education technology to improve outcomes.
In addition to being the Chairman of the Varkey Foundation, Vikas is also the CEO of Tmrw Digital, a for-profit vehicle aimed at education technology.  
On the Ed-Tech front, he recognises that the challenges are significant. He believes we don’t really understand the true potential that technology has in transforming lives in classrooms.  
While meeting Ed-Tech entrepreneurial start-ups and innovators every day to learn about productivity, personalisation etc, what he notes is: “the thing I found most interesting is how woeful the state of affairs is when it comes to ed-tech entrepreneurs, who actually treat ed-tech or the education sector just like they would treat the financial services sector, which is as a market place.”  His message to them is for them always to speak in terms of learning outcomes.  
He asks Ed-Tech entrepreneurs to show him the actual impact their solutions would have.   When he poses this question, three quarters if not more of entrepreneurs just drop away and that is why he has been “sorely disappointed with the state of start-ups” in this space.  
One of the key areas he feels requires our attention is political leadership: one of the challenges is in the way that schools and education systems procure products. Often the high cost of acquisition of a student is so high because one has to go from school to school individually, and that becomes challenging as a business model for Ed-Tech. He feels procurement shouldn’t be thought of simply as how many whiteboards are being purchased but, rather, those makin