Gram Urja

Supported by: Wipro

Vision: Quality education is equally and easily accessible to every child in Maharashtra.

Mission: To build a network of empowered educational leaders from the community who will work directly with children and schools. They will also engage and involve the stakeholders in creating an ecosystem to bring transformational change to the rural educational system and contribute to the community’s development. The strategy is to work directly with children by building a network and capacity of youth educational leaders from rural communities. They will also work with parents, teachers, SMCs, Gram panchayat, and other stakeholders in the village to ensure educational transformation in the rural government and low-income schools.

Location: Ambajogai, Kaij, Dharoor blocks in Beed district of Maharashtra. The Beed district is part of the Marathwada region of Maharashtra. Marathawada region is a resource-depleted region with few opportunities for the natives. So, most families prefer to migrate for livelihood, this raises issues such as educational discontinuity, school dropouts, and low learning outcomes, and in the long run, this results in career losses and a vicious cycle of poverty.

Learnings and Challenges in the past year:

• We learned about the basics of Bhasha, Ganit, and Jivan Kaushalya’s learning process. Rather than traditional ways of learning and teaching, we learned ways of learning by going deep and understanding the process.
• We Learned that working with children is not only a science but an art. It is not a methodology but a process in the flow.
• Rather than just using techniques, we also must believe and focus on the process of teaching and learning.
• Working at scale is less important than working deep with limited scale and reach.
• We also learned about engaging with teachers and the system. This is a little slow process. First, teachers and the system refused to accept our methods and even asked us to focus on completing the syllabus rather than going slow and deep. But later, they have been following our methods and projects.
• Working with parents and equally important, education is not an allied subject. To involve parents in the process, it is required to work with them, for them, and slowly imbibe the values and importance of education.
• While working with primary students, we also must focus on higher-grade students, to create role models for the children we are working with. After the 5th standard, when we will not be working with them directly, we may face challenges such as a lack of support for these children.

Plan for the next one to three years: Work with grade 1-4 children more deeply and understand the process of learning. Involve and learn methods and ways of involving parents. Involve and engage teachers in this transformative process of learning. Learning more ways and methods of involving teachers from the schools we are working with. Building capacity of our team in classroom management, TLM development, curriculum development, and teacher training.