Educate Girls Program Expansion into Rajasthan Poorest Areas
The Program Expansion into Rajasthan’s Poorest Areas project extends the current program into a total of six districts, thereby enrolling 102,000 out of school girls (OOSG). Once Educate Girls has completed expansion into its first region, it plans to expand in regional groupings of approximately three districts to leverage economies of scale in administration and overheads. To expand into three new districts, Educate Girls will recruit and train 110 additional field staff and 4,000 additional Team Balika volunteers. These groups will conduct door-to-door surveys and enrolment drives, strengthen School Management Committees and Village Education Councils in order to be more effective in ensuring that schools and communities are conducive to girls’ education, provide creative learning and teaching kits to every school, and help assess impact. More than 650,000 girls will directly benefit from this project as a result of the school environment becoming more conducive to girls’ education. In addition to reducing the number of OOSG, 6,600 schools will have teachers trained to implement the creative learning and teaching techniques.
Educate Girls empowers the community to sustain this project by creating community ownership of the government schools. As a result, the community is expected to devise self-driven solutions to sustain change beyond Educate Girls, with minimum outside support needed. Beyond 2016, Educate Girls will establish partnerships with other state governments to allow them to replicate its model across India.
*EAC would like to thank the Bharti Foundation for its generous co-financing contribution to this project.