The Campaign

The idea was to create audio schools with the help of just one simple device - an FM radio set. Radio City partnered with candy sellers to teach spoken English to slum kids in a first-of-its-kind tie-up. Incentivizing them to park their cycles in these localities every week, Radio City aired specially designed 10-minute lessons on spoken English. Since the candy cycles are a natural draw for the kids, all the seller had to do was tune in to Radio City at the designated time slot, play the on-air English lesson and hand out free candy to every kid that sat through it.

Creative Execution

We started with on-air promos that announced the idea of the Candy Class and how the kids should look out for candy sellers every Sunday at 4pm. This was followed by tie-ups with local NGOs who helped us recruit these candy sellers and we incentivised them to park their cycles in different pockets of the slums, at the time of the weekly broadcast. The first Candy Class aired on April 24 and we focused on Dharavi in Mumbai, Asia's largest slum. The program has been gaining momentum with every passing week and is now into its third episode. Acorn Foundation is helping us scale up with even more Candy vendors in Dharavi and adjoining slums in Mumbai. With the program soon extending to 10 more cities, Radio City is hopeful that its impact will be significant.

The program has started in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum, Asia,s largest slum colony, and has already directly impacted the lives of over 2000 slum children. With a scalable format and over 22 million listeners across 20 cities, Radio City Candy Class has the potential to deliver the promise of a better future, directly to over 3 million underprivileged children.

A vast majority of radio listeners in India belong to economically weaker sections that cannot afford an English medium education for their children. Knowing basic spoken English is an economic enabler as it gives these kids access to better jobs, and possibly, a future outside the slums. This campaign uses radio as a medium, in an innovative way, to improve the lives of these children, by imparting that important life skill.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

With the help of local NGOs that work in slums, the strategy was to tie up with cycle candy vendors and got a sense of the number of kids they interact with in the slums. We wanted to target these children of slum dwellers who are not privileged enough to get an expensive English education and have no means of picking up the language at home or outside. The core of the idea is not about tracking the number of children who learn through the program, but to set up an open platform for education that can be scaled up effortlessly. As more candy vendors join us with NGO tie-ups, the reach of this program will increase exponentially. The format is such that it is low investment and sustainable in the long term.