Situation

In the rural areas of South India many children have no motivation to go to school, having no imagination where education leads to. They know nobody educated. Their parents have not attended school. So children do not attend classes or leave the school prematurely contributing to the meagre family income at too young age.

The government does not support much to the improvement of the education in the rural area. Because the people do not know any better, nobody is interested in education, so nobody puts pressure on the authorities to handle things seriously. And so everything threatens to stay put.

Ally

Yojana supports small scale development projects for children, their parents en their village in the Indian states Maharashtra and Karnataka, together 13 times as great as the Netherlands. Yojana means project as well as principle in the language of these states. The name has been chosen because Yojana is only supporting projects executed by local partners. The principle is: to allow people helping themselves. Yojana is co-operating on a long time base with four local Indian partners.

Goals

• The project includes 122 villages with one co-ordinator per village, who will be talking with the people and monitoring the process.
• Per school a parent's council will be started. Parents will be learning what their competences are and how to use them. During trainings and meetings food will be available. Apart from that transportation is included.
• City students will be trained to give educational information programmes. Their food and transport is being taken care of too. They will visit the villages selected for them every two months.
• Meetings will be arranged for people from the villages with some education. They have to take part in promoting education as a right to everyone.
• Education will start with the little ones. Forty model nursery schools will be started.
• The present teachers of the village schools will be trained in modern and attractive educational tools.
• The project will raise a little library and a simple, but attractive laboratory.
• Simple educational tools will be required.
  

Inch by inch in the right direction

Depak Dudhale, Indian co-ordinator of EDU-KEY in a report on Yojana's website: " Yesterday I spoke to Dadarao. He is the field co-ordinator of EDU-KEY. We selected Dadarao for this job because he can convince people. Furthermore he is interested deeply in education and in the type of field work necessary to this project. He speaks so loud that he is audible in a big group without a microphone. He is from Kerwadi, the village with our centre and the Dreamland nursery school. Although little educated, he is a born leader. For a couple of years he was member of the panchyat, the elected village council. Dadarao is covering five villages and is very content with his job. When I asked him why so, he said: "I am free to go to every village and talk about the improvement of the education. That is important work."

Furthermore he told that the Village Education Committees (VEC) will be operational at last. These VEC's do exist a long time, but the members did not even know that they were part of it. Their competences and the ways to use them, they did not know. Now they come to understand them via our training programmes. The members are getting interested. We think it is very important that the sarpanch (head of the elected village council) will be visiting every school a few times a week. That happens now. The school of the village Raorajur has not been visited in twenty years by Mr. Sindhe, the sarpanch. But now, mr. Sindhe and all the VEC members visited the school several times. Inch by inch we move into the right direction."