Pratham has been recognized by the Kravis Prize and the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship.
[2] Chavan was the 2012 recipient of the WISE Prize for Education, which is widely considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of education and recipient of Leading-Social-Contributor-Award which is the highest degree award in India for exemplary work in the area of operation.
Madhav Chavan taught chemistry at the University of Houston and the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai before getting involved with adult literacy in the National Literacy Mission in the slums of Mumbai in 1989.
After producing literacy programmes for Doordarshan for a few years, he was invited to work with a Unicef project to teach in Mumbai's slums.
[4] He is also a member of the Governing Council of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan Mission (SSA) of the Government of India and has been a member of four half-yearly Joint Review Missions of SSA.