Aashray Society

Through SAKSHAM, we aim to provide basic elementary non-formal, pre-primary and primary education to these children and introduce them to other activities and opportunities essential for their holistic growth. We also take all necessary steps to enrol the children in nearby schools (public and private) after putting the child through a period (ranging from 3 to 12 months) of age-standard bridge. During this bridging period, we develop appropriate focused strategy for each child and strive to bring the child on par with the corresponding age level, considering her profile and years of education missed due to the migratory experience. Once a child starts attending school, we constantly help them in getting used to the new learning demands as well as to the experience of suddenly spending more time in a school environment rather than at home, thereby reducing drop-outs.

Therefore, we have a two-pronged working strategy:

Stage I is the ‘pre-school’ stage
Stage II is the ‘school stage’

We continuously strive to reduce the bridging period in stage I, so that the children can leap to stage II (and we can introduce more children in stage I), by improving the quality of our own services and adding even more facilities at our centre. We believe that there is an inverse correlation between this aspect and the time a child spends in stage I and thus we pay special attention to the facilities at our centre, within the constraints of resources.

Through SAKSHAM, we aim to provide basic elementary non-formal, pre-primary and primary education to these children and introduce them to other activities and opportunities essential for their holistic growth. We also take all necessary steps to enrol the children in nearby schools (public and private) after putting the child through a period (ranging from 3 to 12 months) of age-standard bridge. During this bridging period, we develop appropriate focused strategy for each child and strive to bring the child on par with the corresponding age level, considering her profile and years of education missed due to the migratory experience. Once a child starts attending school, we constantly help them in getting used to the new learning demands as well as to the experience of suddenly spending more time in a school environment rather than at home, thereby reducing drop-outs.

Therefore, we have a two-pronged working strategy:

Stage I is the ‘pre-school’ stage
Stage II is the ‘school stage’

We continuously strive to reduce the bridging period in stage I, so that the children can leap to stage II (and we can introduce more children in stage I), by improving the quality of our own services and adding even more facilities at our centre. We believe that there is an inverse correlation between this aspect and the time a child spends in stage I and thus we pay special attention to the facilities at our centre, within the constraints of resources.

Through Saksham, we also provide every child at least one nutritious meal per day as well as a holistic healthcare plan including basic health screening, medications, immunization programs and regular health checkups and treatment in collaboration with our partners in healthcare. We additionally conduct regular mental health workshops to counsel children in distress and uplift their mental health levels. These measures are useful for monitoring the mental and physical health of the children which tend to suffer due to their living conditions as well as to incentivize the parents to continue sending the children to our centre and schools. At our current centre, we provide a space for the conduct of holistic integrated programs, that primarily focus on the educative and cognitive development of children between the tender ages of 2 to 14 years. This is the early, yet, crucial phase of development where maximum emotional and educational development occurs. In the case of urban poor migrant children, such development is already obstructed due to the experience of migration and city life and thus, their continued care and overall development assumes great importance in this respect.



Our centre is open 6 days a week (excluding Sundays), between 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the first half of the day, we have children who are not yet attending schools; while in the second half, children who have started going to schools come to the centre. Besides engaging with the learning and development process, both sets of children are provided with a meal at our centre appropriate to their age-nutritional requirements.



In terms of early childhood care (2 - 6 years age group), we engage the children with numbers, shapes, colors, art work stories, poems and songs, besides basic non-formal pre-primary education. Play-way and Art therapy are a big feature of our programs. With respect to children in the age group of 6 – 14 years, there is an additional focus on functional literacy and providing non formal primary level education. We aim to inspire, sensitize, motivate and educate young children with an education program using a hands-on learning approach. Since practical exercises and activities enable children to learn and imbibe comprehensively, special teaching aids are used to make learning easy along with traditional concepts like story book reading, song sessions and art and craftwork. We provide colourful and interactive books, fun filled activities, drawing, skill building, recreation workshops additionally enhance confidence. Our extracurricular activities also incorporate clay modelling, art workshops, dance and drama workshops, leisure programs, festival celebrations all aimed towards providing the children an integrated development and discover the joys of childhood.

In addition, we utilize the exposure with the children in rebuilding their individual dignity and lost confidence and also, to improve their nutritional levels and monitor their health. Through our continued dialogues with the families of the children themselves, we constantly create innovative and sustainable solutions with community support, where the children and the females are seen as agents of change from the vicious cycle of poverty, illiteracy, unemployment and hunger.



Our association with these children also brings us in constant contact with their adolescent brothers and sisters, as well as their mothers, with whom we carry out extension programs, specifically geared towards health, hygiene and psycho-social counselling. We do this at the moment through our network of health specialists and counsellors, specialists with children and adults. Thus, we are able to reach out effectively to the urban poor migrant families and assist efficiently, even within resource constraints and our centre acts as a meeting point for the various families and the volunteers.

The challenges in conducting SAKSHAM mainly pertain to the impacts of migration and urbanization on the poor, especially the children, girls and women. They also reflect our own resource constraints, which, if addressed, will provide sustainable solutions to these challenges.

1. In terms of access to quality education for migrant children, the impediments begin from the direct relation between poverty and the access to (quality) education. For such children, realistically, there are only two avenues for access to education: government schools (free), and, private schools under the Right to Education Act (only fees exempted – significant costs for books, uniform, etc., are not waived). Therefore, effectively, they can only access government schools and not low-cost/high-cost private schools, which blocks them comprehensively from quality education. Moreover, they do not have the resource backing to enroll in any kind of residential schools to mitigate the obstacles imposed by the often temporary nature of their migration status resulting in regular breaks in their learning process.
   
   We want to open up these opportunities for our beneficiary children particularly through an individual child sponsorship campaign to commence in early - 2019. The motive of the campaign is to attract sponsorship for all our beneficiary children to access quality education. We also have a long-term plan to start our own hostels on the lines of related initiatives which have been successfully implemented in states like Rajasthan.


2. A particular challenge we face in our work is relating to the girl child. There is an evident gender aspect to the informal economy around our area of operation. There is wide demand for girls in the age group of 11-18 years to work as domestic help and nannies, in which the poor migrant girls tend to get caught. The existing bias against the girl child within the communities confronted with the perceived significant income which they can earn, challenges the value of education for the girl child within these communities, besides exposing them to exploitation of various kinds. This poses a complex challenge.
   
   In this respect, we work to build interest in not just education but also in wider learning to expand the horizons of opportunities for the girls, in turn empowering them. We believe that acquiring functional skills alongside formal education can positively empower the young girls and women, within our beneficiaries. Therefore, we want to complement our education-oriented programs with dynamic skill-development activities at our current and future centres, particularly for young girls, such as computer courses, English language classes, art courses, non-formal teaching training, etc.

As a non-profit social organisation, working with some of the most marginalized sections of our society, it is important that our own programs are not hampered by any breaks, so that we can effectively contribute to our beneficiaries. In this respect, funding is a critical aspect in the short term while having fixed locations of our centres through which we operate is important in the medium and long-term growth of our NGO. These are also relevant to track the impact of our programs in the lives of the migrant community as well as to ensure cross-communities participation in our society. It is only through our continued interventions can we assist in sustaining health, hygiene and nutrition levels and ensuring that the children continue with their education.



As the area along the Greater Noida Expressway is a bustling upcoming corporate and affluent locality, the demand for informal markets and services as well as construction has increased exponentially. This will continue to increase the number of poor migrant families and so the number of accompanying children.

This is where our intervention is required and also unique. We run our programmes through our centres which also act as ‘safe spaces’ for the children and women we work with. We are ambitious having 3 fully functional centres, each with one hall (adequate for accommodating 30-35 students) and one smaller room for classroom in addition to space for facilities such as library, computer classes, vocational training and activity room, etc. The target of each centre will be to prepare at least 80 children each year for schools, assist in enrolling them and thereafter monitor their development for a period of 1-3 years. In this way, our aim is to provide our services for nearly 300 children and many women and families through our centres.

We are confident that our growing network of contributors, partners and well-wishers will enable us to benefit from enough contributions to address our requirements, both urgent and medium / long term, besides constructively partnering with us and sharing our beliefs. We are highly motivated not to let our resource constraints hinder the positive impact of our programs.

SAKSHAM is our flagship long-term project, which was formally launched in June 2018, after a successful pilot between April 2016 and May 2018. This project is aimed at the overall sustainable learning development of children from poor families, including urban migrant and rural families. Presently, we are situated in Noida, however, we are close to extending this project to rural areas.

Our goal, under SAKSHAM, is to prepare children from urban migrant or rural poor families, within the geographical area of 5 km radius of our centres, for a quality learning experience and enrol them in nearby schools in an age-appropriate standard. Further, the critical focus of our project is to develop sustainable and efficient conditions, by working towards zero drop-outs amongst these children, and by encouraging them to complete their education without any further breaks.


The motivations of SAKSHAM are to:

• Provide access to quality education for disadvantaged children, thereby, fulfilling the Right to Education under the Indian Constitution for the underprivileged children.
• Restore lost childhood and dignity by opening the horizons of these children towards the vast learning opportunities in academics, sports, music, art, drama, etc.
• Shift the focus towards education and learning of children, thereby, reducing the economic 'value' of child labour for the migrant poor families.
• Provide healthcare, hygiene education and nutrition benefits to the children.
• Improve the status of the girl child, adolescent girls and mothers.
• Positively impact the mindset of the parents and the wider community, through innovative partnerships with the community, in order to encourage sustainable overall development.

The growth of the peripheral area around the Greater Noida Expressway increases the likelihood of the sustained incoming of poor migrants to fill the informal labour demands in the area. This will add to the number of vulnerable children and women with no welfare structures in place to ensure to them low-cost housing, education, health, safety, etc. National goals for poverty reduction, eradicating illiteracy and empowering women are hard to achieve, unless the problem of labour mobility and its impact of children and women is squarely addressed. Therefore, NGOs, like ours, fill a critical protection gap for such communities, thereby justifying our presence, growth and impact.

The realities of migration through urbanization are often grim for the poor and vulnerable. The poor migrants lead a life on the move with zero job security in a volatile informal economy where they work under very harsh conditions and make, at best, the basic minimum wage - which are often not enough to feed entire families. Their lives are characterized by temporary inadequate shelter as they live in cramped shacks or shanties and makeshift sheds covered with tin/plastic sheets, which are at constant threat of being demolished by the authorities.

Lack of basic amenities and inadequate hygiene and safety facilities are a common feature in these dwellings. The children, uprooted from their social safety nets back in the villages, are thrown into an alien environment. With both parents struggling for long hours to carry on insecure livelihoods, the children are left to ‘play’ on heaps of rubble and concrete and on roads. There is often no one to take adequate care of them apart from their older siblings, who themselves are deprived of critical development opportunities due to this burden. The condition of these children is disheartening, to say the least, with no access to basic nutrition, heath care, medical care and education, and potentially trapping them in a vicious cycle of vulnerability.

Therefore, Aashray Society’s specific emphasis, through our project - SAKSHAM, is to expand the horizons of opportunities for these children and their parents by inculcating in them lifelong interest in the enriching process of learning. We, at Aashray, believe that this would have a direct positive impact on the lives of poor families, at an individual and community level, in addition to indirect benefit to the national goals on equality, literacy, growth and development on a larger scale.

Through SAKSHAM, we aim to provide basic elementary non-formal, pre-primary and primary education to these children and introduce them to other activities and opportunities essential for their holistic growth. We also take all necessary steps to enrol the children in nearby schools (public and private) after putting the child through a period (ranging from 3 to 12 months) of age-standard bridge. During this bridging period, we develop appropriate focused strategy for each child and strive to bring the child on par with the corresponding age level, considering her profile and years of education missed due to the migratory experience. Once a child starts attending school, we constantly help her in getting used to the new learning demands as well as to the experience of suddenly spending more time in a school environment rather than at home, to address drop-outs.

Therefore, we have a two-pronged working strategy:

Stage I is the ‘pre-school’ stage
Stage II is the ‘school stage’

We continuously strive to reduce the bridging period in stage I, so that the children can leap to stage II (and we can introduce more children in stage I), by improving the quality of our own services and adding even more facilities at our centre. We believe that there is an inverse correlation between our own capacities and the time a child spends in stage I and thus we pay special attention to the facilities at our centre, within the constraints of resources.

We also provide every child at least one nutritious meal per day as well as a holistic healthcare plan including basic health screening, medications, immunization programs and regular health checkups and treatment in collaboration with our partners in healthcare. We additionally conduct regular mental health workshops to counsel children in distress and uplift their mental health levels. These measures are useful for monitoring the mental and physical health of the children which tend to suffer due to their living conditions as well as to incentivize the parents to continue sending the children to our centre and schools.

At our current centre, we provide a space for the conduct of holistic integrated programs, that primarily focus on the educative and cognitive development of children between the tender ages of 2 to 14 years. This is the early, yet, crucial phase of development where maximum emotional and educational development occurs. In the case of urban poor migrant children, such development is already obstructed due to the experience of migration and city life and thus, their continued care and overall development assumes great importance in this respect.



Our centre is open 6 days a week (excluding Sundays), between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. In the first half of the day, we have children who are not yet attending schools; while in the second half, children who have started going to schools come to the centre. Besides engaging with the learning and development process, both sets of children are provided with a meal at our centre appropriate to their age-nutritional requirements.



In terms of early childhood care (2 - 6 years age group), we engage the children with numbers, shapes, colors, art work stories, poems and songs, besides basic non-formal pre-primary education. Play-way and Art therapy are a big feature of our programs. With respect to children in the age group of 6 – 14 years, there is an additional focus on functional literacy and providing non formal primary level education. We aim to inspire, sensitize, motivate and educate young children with an education program using a hands-on learning approach. Since practical exercises and activities enable children to learn and imbibe comprehensively, special teaching aids are used to make learning easy along with traditional concepts like story book reading, song sessions and art and craftwork. We provide colourful and interactive books, fun filled activities, drawing, skill building, recreation workshops additionally enhance confidence. Our extracurricular activities also incorporate clay modelling, art workshops, dance and drama workshops, leisure programs, festival celebrations all aimed towards providing the children an integrated development and discover the joys of childhood.

In addition, we utilize the exposure with the children in rebuilding their individual dignity and lost confidence and also, to improve their nutritional levels and monitor their health. Through our continued dialogues with the families of the children themselves, we constantly create innovative and sustainable solutions with community support, where the children and the girls are seen as agents of change from the vicious cycle of poverty, illiteracy, unemployment and hunger.



Our association with these children also brings us in constant contact with their adolescent brothers and sisters, as well as their mothers, with whom we carry out extension programs, specifically geared towards health, hygiene and psycho-social counselling. We do this at the moment through our network of health specialists and counsellors, specialists with children and adults. Thus, we are able to reach out effectively to the urban poor migrant families and assist efficiently, even within resource constraints and our centre acts as a meeting point for the various families and the volunteers.

SAKSHAM was preceded by a Pilot SAKSHAM, which was in conducted between April 2016 and May 2018. The target of the pilot was to enrol 25 children (between the age group of 5-14 years) from poor migrant families, in nearby schools and develop sustainable and efficient conditions which encourage them to continue their education without any further breaks. A two-year period was taken for the pilot Saksham since preparing these children for schools is often a challenge in case of migrant poor children. At the same time, keeping the children in schools is another challenge due to the realities of their lived experiences in the city as migrants. Therefore, a period of one year was taken to adequately prepare a child for the educational requirements as well as the environment in a school. Thereafter, another one year was undertaken to keep the child in school.

The pilot started with a conservative corpus from private contribution and a space for its centre provided rent-free by a supporter for two years. In terms of paid employees, it had two employees – a program coordinator and a helper. The main aim of the pilot was to learn the realities of operationalizing long-term social projects.


Through the pilot, we managed to overstep our target by preparing 30 more children than anticipated who are now in schools, private and government. The pilot also gave us an opportunity to build the appropriate networks and test out various strategies to effectively work with our beneficiary children, women and families. We learnt how to handle the various challenges, at the same time, strengthening the foundations of our work to continually reach out to more and more over the coming years.

Most importantly, the pilot reminded us how much was still let to be done, hence, the motivation to immediately launch a formal project SAKSHAM in June 2018.

The challenges in conducting SAKSHAM mainly pertain to the impacts of migration and urbanization on the poor, especially the children, girls and women. They also reflect the resource constraints for an NGO to operationalise such programmes in a city. However, we are confident of improving our impact and increasing the scope of our work towards alleviating the cycle of poverty for migrants in India.

• In terms of access to quality education for migrant children, the impediments begin from the direct relation between poverty and the access to (quality) education. For such children, realistically, there are only two avenues for access to education: government schools (free), and, private schools under the Right to Education Act (only fees exempted – significant costs for books, uniform, etc., are not waived).
  
  The effect of this is that they can only access government schools and not low-cost/high-cost private schools, which blocks them comprehensively from quality education - an issue which also generally plagues our education system. Moreover, they do not have the resource backing to enroll in any kind of residential schools to mitigate the obstacles imposed by the often temporary nature of their migration status resulting in regular breaks in their learning process.
  
  We want to open up these opportunities for our beneficiary children particularly through a focussed individual child sponsorship campaign. The motive of the campaign is to attract sponsorship for all our beneficiary children to access quality education.


• A particular challenge we face in our work is relating to the girl child. There is an evident gender aspect to the informal economy around our area of operation. There is wide demand for girls in the age group of 9-16 years to work as domestic help and nannies, in which the poor migrant girls tend to get caught. The existing bias against the girl child within the communities confronted with the perceived significant income which they can earn, challenges the value of education for the girl child within these communities, besides exposing them to exploitation of various kinds. This poses a complex challenge.
  
  In this respect, we work to build interest in not just education but also in wider learning to expand the horizons of opportunities for the girls, in turn creating opportunities for them to empower themselves. We believe that acquiring functional skills alongside formal education can positively impact the lives of the young girls and women, from the communities we work with. Therefore, we want to complement our education-oriented programs with dynamic skill-development activities at our current and future centres, particularly for young girls, such as computer courses, english language classes, art courses, non-formal teaching training, etc., which we strive to do under our other project, SWAYAM.

As a non-profit social organisation, working with some of the most marginalized sections of our society, it is important that our own programs are not hampered by any breaks, so that we can effectively contribute to our beneficiaries. In this respect, funding is a critical aspect in the short term while having fixed locations of our centres through which we operate is important in the medium and long term growth of our NGO. These are also relevant to track the impact of our programs in the lives of the migrant community as well as to ensure cross-communities participation in our society. It is only through our continued interventions can we assist in sustaining health, hygiene and nutrition levels and ensuring that the children continue with their education.



As the area along the Greater Noida Expressway is a bustling upcoming corporate and affluent locality, the demand for informal markets and services as well as construction activities has increased exponentially. This will continue to increase the number of poor migrant families and so the number of accompanying children deprived of adequate growth and education.

This is where our intervention is required and is also unique. We run our programmes through our centres which also act as ‘safe spaces’ for the poor slum families we work with. We are ambitious of having numerous fully functional centres, both in cities and also in villages from where migration is happening, each with one hall (adequate for accommodating 30-35 students) and one smaller room for classroom in addition to space for facilities such as library, computer classes, vocational training and activity room, etc. The target of each centre will be to prepare at least 80 - 100 children each year for schools, assist in enrolling them and thereafter monitoring their development for a period of 1-3 years. Moreover, we also aim to assist the families in various manners, especially the women, including through the activities under SWAYAM.

We are also ambitious of opening hostels for the migrant poor children to overcome the breaks in their education posed by the realities of continuous poverty-induced migration, on the lines of similiar hostel initiatives in Rajasthan and Orissa. Finally, we are excitedly close to extending our projects - SAKSHAM and SWAYAM - to the rural areas which are prone to the exodus of poor vulnerable communities.

We are confident that our growing network of contributors, partners and well-wishers will enable us to address our requirements, both urgent and medium / long term, besides constructively partnering with us and working together. We are highly motivated not to let our resource constraints hinder the positive impact of our programmes.