The Child Brides: Send Them to School instead

I would like to thank you for your continuous and generous support to our project 'The Child Brides: Send Them to School instead'. We are grateful for your donation. Your donation has made a huge difference in improving girls’ access to quality education in Rajasthan, India.

It is a well-documented fact that educated girls have a unique ability to bring unprecedented social & economic change to their families and communities and have a phenomenal multiplier effects on all development indicators. Our program aims to usher in systemic reform, bridge the gender gap in education & provide quality education to 2.8 million under-served children annually in India by 2018.

Thanks to the generosity of the donors like you, we have enrolled over 200,000 unique out-of-school girls into school since our program inception (Year 2007). In the FY 2016-17 alone, we have been successful to enrol over 93,000 girls in school. We have achieved a 93% retention of girls in school and students have improved their learning in Hindi, English and Math by 25-45%.

Over the past decade, India has made significant progress toward universalization of primary education, which has led to increased access to schools for a large number of children. However, quality of education and low levels of learning continue to remain a major challenge in the government run schools of India. Recent studies show a disturbing trend, where although children are enrolled in school, they aren’t necessarily learning well. 47.8% of children in Grade 5 cannot read a Grade 2 text.

In order to help children learn well and achieve higher learning outcomes, Educate Girls has been implementing its activity-based pedagogy Creative Learning and Teaching (CLT) kitsin grades 3, 4 and 5 for a period of 24 weeks of an academic session. The CLT sessions complement the conventional school curriculum, and have helped make the classroom a stress-free and conducive environment, where children learn the basics of literacy and numeracy while having fun through games and group activities. Over the years, with the help of Educate Girls learning curriculum more than 650,000 children have demonstrated improved learning levels.

With the announcement of the Sustainable Development Goals (2015), globally, the focus is gradually shifting toward ensuring quality education. In the light of these developments, Educate Girls embarked upon a project to revamp its learning curriculum. Educate Girls partnered with Sol’s Assessment and Remedial Centre (Sol’s ARC), a pedagogy and child psychology expert, to revamp the curriculum. Educate Girls new learning kit are called ‘Gyan ka Pitara' - GKP (which translates to ‘Repository of Knowledge’). A few features that make the new learning kit unique –

-  Curriculum is designed for 5 levels of learning (pre-literacy & levels 1-4) for children in grades 3, 4 and 5.

-  Focus on building micro-competencies in English, Hindi and Math

-  Activity-based pedagogy with about 250 worksheets for each child, ensuring no child is left behind

-  Child friendly, context-specific, sensitive to the needs of the most under-served and marginalized children in India.

-  Tools include: Cards for alphabet recognition, sight words, word family and conversation flip books, sentence strips, auditory and practice cards in English and Hindi. Number cards, rule cards, number boards and building blocks for place value and operations in Math.

-  Pre-tests & post-tests based on ASER tools of evaluation determine improvement in learning levels for every child.

These learning kits will be implemented across all our operational schools in rural districts of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh in order to improve the learning levels of the children.

In light of this, we have launched a new project on GlobalGiving “You Can Help Children in Rural India Learn Better”

You can help the children in rural India learn better. With a donation of USD 45, you can sponsor a ‘Gyan ka Pitaara’ kit for a remote school in Rajasthan or Madhya Pradesh and benefit around 30 children! 

Your Help is Crucial in improving Learning Outcomes of the Children!