UNIQUE TRAIN-LIKE MODEL SCHOOL
Aahwahan Foundation is a grass root level NGO with a PAN India presence. Our team of brilliant and versatile young people has been striving to improve the lives of people from marginalised communities. Our organisation works in five sectors, which are NGO for Education, health, the environment, women’s empowerment, and community development. We’ve always engaged in the educational context, and we’ve developed a number of initiatives that are both distinctive and customisable, making the process more efficient.
After numerous brainstorming and discussion sessions, we came to the conclusion that assisting a government school in need, where students from underprivileged society can have access to NGO works in Education, is significantly superior to building a new school as it will reach rather more students. As a corollary, our team launched the ‘Adopting a government and scaling up its infrastructure’ initiative, in which we would empower government schools with whatever necessities they have in order to enhance the quality of learning, ultimately improving the lives of many disadvantaged children. Currently, our team has adopted over 200 government schools and has been assisting them with basic infrastructure, such as school buildings, drinking water filter, sanitation facility, and providing benches and desks, among other things. One of the model schools with whom we have been working is highlighted below.
Education for Poor Child Baidhara Govt. UP School in Baiganbaria was founded in 1964 and was at the period a well-known and only government school in the area. The school also has a history of being the only renowned school in the said area, with students travelling from other towns to study. The school is tucked between agricultural grounds and a short distance from the village. Due to the lack of a sufficient pathway to the school, poor toilets, infrastructure and its poor state during the rainy season, parents in the area began sending their children to schools that were further away, resulting in a high number of dropouts. However, because so many of the community’s occupants lacked the financial means to send their children to private schools, they were forced to drop out. Afterwards, Aahwahan’s team of experts decided to go to the school and the surrounding community to investigate and understand the challenges and needs of the school and the students.
During the lockdown, the Aahwahan Foundation adopted the school through the Odissa government and began construction, painting, and design work in order to maintain a reliable and sanitary learning environment for the students, as well as providing with the necessary infrastructure. The team decided to structure the school in the form of a train to attract more students and make learning more enjoyable for them. Aside from that, our team decided to go door to door to raise awareness about the problem that drove parents to return their children back to the government school. This resulted in an increased number of admissions and a lower dropout rate, both of which will have a significant impact on the lives of the community’s inhabitants and the community as a whole. Our team continues to work with many further schools to make it a model school that will compete with private schools in terms of educational quality and reach out to more low-income children.