Schooling: Enroll and Retain children in preschools and schools

Our projects focus on vulnerable communities who face challenges with universal coverage, out of school children, poor attendance and retention. Some of these communities live in deep rural areas and are primitive tribal groups , socially disadvantaged communities such as scheduled castes, linguistic minority communities at interstate borders and migrant populations like brick kiln workers. We work in these communities to ensure children are enrolled in school, attend school regularly and transition to higher grades while achieving desired learning competencies.

• We partner with the government to ensure school infrastructure and services are available and functioning per specified norms.
• We conduct door-to-door visits (and other awareness programs) to educate the community to enroll their children in school and participate in their education.
• We build community ownership and participation by activating and strengthening the mothers committees and school monitoring committees. This involves training the parents about their roles and responsibilities in school monitoring committees.
• We involve the children in the change, by activating child rights clubs and child parliaments in schools.
• We support the teacher by training them on child friendly teaching methodologies and providing learning material for classrooms.

We divide our work into three distinct age groups that also map to the Government programs that support each of these groups.

•    Preschools for children under 6 years, that are part of the Government’s Anganwadi program
•    Primary Schools for 6-14 years old children
•    Upper Primary and High Schools for children above 14 years

The purpose of UN Sustainable Development (SDG) Goal 4 is ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. ILP has aligned all its achievement/impact indicators with the the education-related targets and indicators of UN SDG Goal 4. 

In the last 10 years of our work across 8 states, our projects have created the following impact.

• 174 – Government Preschools Opened/Upgraded through community empowerment
• 175 –  Government Schools Opened/Upgraded through community empowerment
• 3,000 – Schools with active community involvement in governance and infrastructure

Enrollment  & Retention

• 32,000 children enrolled into schools
• 10,000  children who had dropped out, re-enrolled into schools
• 300,000 children retained in schools