Aarohi

About the organization

Aarohi envisions mountain communities that are educated, employable, financially sustainable, and healthy. Aarohi’s mission is to create better opportunities through quality healthcare and education, sustainable natural resource management, and women empowerment.

Our strategy to overcome the identified gaps is through interventions in multiple domains such as health, education, livelihoods, and natural resource management. We partake in a multi-stakeholder approach that actively involves beneficiaries, district and block-level officials, Panchayati Raj Institutions, and other Civil Society Organizations. 

Location of work

We work in Nainital, with a specific focus on the Ramgarh, Okhalkanda and Dhari blocks. In Almora, our efforts are concentrated on the Baisiyachana block. And in Udham Singh Nagar we have a presence in Khatima and Sitarganj blocks.

Project update

In the aforementioned blocks, there are countless single-teacher schools in rough terrains. This is largely responsible for poor learning levels, especially in the mountain areas. With this background in mind, we work towards improving learning outcomes at the foundational level through contemporary pedagogies. We also invest our energies in the capacity building of young passionate aspiring teachers. An effort is made to translate policy, in the form of the New Education Policy (NEP) of 2022, into the teaching-learning methods being employed in classrooms. 

Learning

• An effort should be made to involve all stakeholders in the form of parents, teachers, village heads, school heads, etc. in understanding the importance of education learning. 
• Discussions around effective, lifelong learning using contemporary methodologies are quite limited. This has to be compensated. 
• It is important to involve the block/district-level administrators in the interventions/activities of the project 

Challenges

• The NEP, 2020, looks beautiful on paper, but district officials do little to translate it. Many Government Teachers do not believe in the importance of NEP2020/ NCF2022, even after attending series of trainings
• Shifting from a ‘teacher-centered classroom’ to a ‘child-centered classroom’ is a time-consuming process. 
• Capacity development training is quite helpful.
• Improvement in cognitive, physical, communication, and socio-emotional skills has been observed in the learners who underwent various art-led sessions in the classroom 
• Rote learning is a deep-rooted issue, especially in remote areas 
• NGOs are expected to only provide what the government demands, thus ensuring that the entire process of change remains top-down. The project’s Shiksha Sahayaks are sometimes ill-treated by the government teachers and heads. 
• Motivating government teachers to take up creative methodologies in the classrooms is also a challenge. 
• We also have to strive harder to learn fresh learnings into the content of upcoming trainings. 

Plan of action

The Aarohi team is meeting on 12-13 Apr to discuss and finalize the plan for a new academic session. This will be shared as soon as it is ready and approved. We will continue to execute monthly in-house training in the coming year as well. Some team members will also be participating in the partner-initiated training on a quarterly/bi-annual basis. We are also incorporating designing and visual art sessions into the existing repertoire of our interventions.