We trained volunteers to equip families with the right knowledge about the major harm and safety issues caused by child marriage
We conducted workshops, training sessions, and shared several tools and resources about harm and safety with our volunteers to help them understand the severity of children being out of school. We also planned with our volunteers on ways they can engage with families and get their buy-in.

We connected families to government financial schemes
We worked with local authorities and volunteers to identify and share relevant information on state-wide and nation-wide schemes to support their child’s education, such as:

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• Sukanya Samriddhi Yojna (guides parents to build a fund to take care of their daughter’s future education)

• Tejaswani Program (Jharkhand Govt.’s flagship program supported by the world bank. Aims to ensure that all girls complete their secondary education, and develop relevant market-skills through vocational training for better livelihood opportunities.)

• MGNREGA 

• Microfinance Schemes

 

We worked with school principals on strategies to track and keep children
in school
We worked on co-creating negotiation strategies to help principals have open dialogue with parents. The community volunteers and principals jointly worked with parents through individual and/or community outreach (PTM, awareness camps) to understand the challenges families faced, and build a joint action plan to bring children back to school. We also developed different plans to ensure we can effectively track and monitor the attendance of children, and flag missing / drop outs at every stage.

We built processes and systems for Panchayats and women volunteers to track unsafe migrations in their communities.

The community volunteers in collaboration with 49 Panchayats set up a register in each Panchayat to record details of migrating families from their communities. Trained volunteers along with the help of Panchayats to negotiate with migrating families to keep their children in the communities with a trusted adult while they traveled. While we can’t stop families from migrating for work, our goal was to ensure every child had a responsible, caring adult looking after them in the absence of their parents. 

 

We set up remedial centres for out of school children
Remedial centres were set up as a solution to help children continue their learning and education, until they felt confident enough to go back to school. This worked remarkably in the past but more so during COVID, to reduce the learning gap. The centres are physical spaces where children and especially adolescents are provided the opportunity to meet with their peers, catch up on their learning or even just take a break from their daily chores at home or work under the supervision of trained volunteers. The school authorities have also played a crucial role and have  proactively helped volunteers to identify local teachers and para-teachers to assist with running the centres.