Over 33 years, VIDYA has made a difference to the lives of 3,50,000 people. We started with just a small center in Delhi, and now we're in 5 metros, with 70 projects across the country. We strive every day to provide high-quality education, empowerment, opportunities and second chances to the 12,000 children across 40 schools, 5,000 youth and 2,500 women we support.
Underprivileged communities exist in a vicious cycle of poverty, unemployment, and lack of education. Even with the school attendance rates now being significantly higher across the country, there is an extremely high number of dropouts, students and adults who are unable to pursue further education and lack the necessary set of skills to find employment. Unless we break the cycle of 'first generation' learners we cannot achieve social development.
Our work enables individuals to dream big, achieve their goals and create the social change they want to see in the world. Ensuring employability and building capacity is the VIDYA ethos. This means we place significant focus on holistic education, English literacy, life skills, numeracy, vocational training, and facilitating entrepreneurship. This way, we empower individuals to confidently better themselves and enable them to help others do the same.
The dropout rate is reduced as students are motivated with better learning to stay in school. Our additional focus on spoken English, IT Skills, life skills, and vocational training across all VIDYA programs, for all levels of students, significantly improves confidence, employability and the ability to find opportunities. Communities become safer and more progressive with empowered individuals going back to lead change. There is greater awareness, employability and far lesser crime.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).