Merlia Shaukath is the Founder and CEO of Madhi Foundation, a Chennai-based nonprofit working to end the foundational learning crisis in India's public schools. She studied Economics at Stella Maris College in Chennai, then earned an MSc in Area Development Studies from the University of Oxford and an MSc in Governance and Management from the London School of Economics. Her grandfather was a social reformer who co-founded educational institutions for India's Muslim community. Her parents were first-generation entrepreneurs.

She was the first staff member at Teach For India, where she helped build the Chennai chapter. She then moved into policy consulting at Athena Infonomics, working directly with state governments. She founded Madhi in 2016 to close the gap between policy and classroom practice. Madhi is the chief management partner of Tamil Nadu's Ennum Ezhuthum foundational learning mission, which reaches about 37,000 primary schools, 2–2.5 million children and around 100,000 teachers. During that work, the share of classrooms getting the target number of teacher-coach visits rose from 1% to 86%, and Tamil Nadu moved up the National Achievement Survey rankings for the first time in a decade. Madhi is now expanding to Meghalaya and Nagaland. Merlia is an Ashoka Fellow, a Mulago Rainer Arnhold Fellow and an Acumen India Fellow, and a Principal Investigator with the What Works Hub for Global Education at Oxford.

In this episode, Merlia talks with Svenia Busson about:

• Why "no one is self-made," and how a social-reformer grandfather and entrepreneur parents shaped a social entrepreneur
• Going from Teach For India classrooms to state-level policy work, and seeing inequity as a systems problem
• Ten years of systems reform: "scale is humbling," scaling programmes back from great to good, and why there's no playbook for implementation
• Why evidence doesn't automatically lead to change, with the politics of multigrade classrooms (70% of Indian primary schools) as the example
• AI in systems where children can't yet read, and why foundational learning has to mean more than literacy and numeracy in an AI-native world
• AI for the adults in the system: lightening the load for teachers and the 3,500 teacher coaches in Tamil Nadu without adding to cognitive decline
• The numbers she cares about most: coach visits rising from 1% to 86%, and "effective teacher" ratings dropping from 90% to 19% as coaches set a higher bar
• Speech-based assessment and oracy, including why Madhi is collecting voice data from 35,000 children to build a Tamil reading-fluency model, and the emotional cost of AI that gets a child wrong
• Why parents are the overlooked lever: 72% didn't know their child was struggling to read, and what non-literate parents can still do at home