Swadhar

Supported by: Wipro Cares

About Swadhar

The goal of Swadhar’s Project Akshardeep is to create a model for quality education and overall development of underserved children from birth until 18 years in an urban slum community with the collective participation of parents and community. The experience gathered through implementation and the analysis of the data puts forth a challenge of learning crises. The school enrolments have been on the rise but the basic learning benchmarks in numeracy and literacy are yet to be achieved. The stakeholders, namely children and parents that we have been working with, come from the underserved communities and especially migrant communities. This creates disinterest among the children in pursuing education and thereby, leads to dropouts. At Swadhar, we strongly believe in confronting these learning crises through our strategies.

New Approaches adopted in response to COVID

The subsequent lockdown as the effect of COVID-19 pandemic had put the physical activities at Swadhar on hold. With the changing scenarios, we also had to adapt to the digital media in order to reach out to our beneficiaries. The capacities of the field team were developed in delivering and planning to reach out virtually to the target beneficiaries. The team adapted to the new methodology and prepared session plans and distributed kits based on the blended approach to the children.

While the preparations and deliveries were strongly executed, we truly owe our gratitude to the parents of our children, who have stood strong with us to ensure that we reach out to the children with education. They have not simply limited themselves to education. They participated in grocery distribution to the needy families in a disciplined manner. Distribution of grocery in lockdown became possible only because of them. We can proudly mention that the strength of our interventions today is the participation of our community. On the other hand, this year the Education Department of Pune called us to present our strategies and thereby, asking for support to the formal system in learning while adapting the models and strategies.

Early Childhood Care and Education

At Swadhar, we strongly believe in confronting these learning crises through our strategies, such as working right from the conception i.e. Early Childhood Care and Education to the age group of 14 years. As a part of this strategy, we run Balwadi classes for children in the age group of 3-6 years, support classes for 6-14 years, and conduct e-learning for the 8-16 years age group. For parents and the community, we run awareness campaigns and programs for early childhood care, development, and the Right to Education Act. Children are being supported as per their competency levels in order to be geared up to their age-appropriate levels.

This strategy has enabled in ensuring retention of 531 children in the schooling process. In addition to this, digital world has been expanding very fast; hence, gearing up the capacities of 89 children. Apart from this, we, at Swadhar, believe that investing in early childhood development is of utmost importance as this period lays the foundation for health, well-being, learning, and productivity throughout a person’s life. Hence, we ensured to reach out to this category of children who are the most vulnerable in the critical pandemic situation. In all, we reached out to 594 children and 410 mothers. All the above-mentioned interventions have reached the target groups through live classes/sessions and blended educational approach.

Location

Pune- 8 Community pockets at Bibwewadi; Pimpri Chinchwad- 5 Community pockets at PCMC.

Plan for Next 1-3 Year

1. To improve the quality of our direct intervention
2. To improve the quality of Education in the intervention areas by developing Foundational Skills (basic literacy and numeracy) and Transferable Skills (problem solving, negotiation and critical thinking) since the early years.
3. Substantial Investment in pooling participation of the parents in the educational process for sustainable development.
4. To improve our capacity as a resource organization.
5. To help strengthen the existing systems for delivering Child Friendly Quality Education by harnessing the creative potential of each child.
6. Expansion to rural areas for equitable access and retention of the ethnic groups in the educational system.