Aashray Society

SWAYAM is our skill-based, self-reliance project which complements SAKSHAM, and focusses especially on older children, adolescents, youth, young girls, women and men, from underprivileged families living in urban slums. SWAYAM’s aim is to upskill such persons who have lost critical formal education years and are stuck in the highly volatile informal labour markets. Through SWAYAM, we provide special skills and vocational trainings as well as introduce them to our strategic partnerships with various stakeholders, employers, schools, universities, etc. Volunteers are the core of operationalising SWAYAM.


Our focus through SWAYAM is to make our beneficiaries independent in the sense of the access to opportunities in order to disentangle them from the chains of insecure daily wage or low wage informal labour markets. Further, these jobs are particularly risky for young girls and women, therefore, it is important to introduce multiple skills to broaden their job horizons.

Government schemes geared towards child and women welfare rarely take into account their migratory experience, which we encounter in our close association with them, however, connecting these communities to the welfare schemes is vital nevertheless. Thus, under SWAYAM, we work to connect the poor (potential) migrant communities with government schemes focussing on skill-development, poverty alleviation, jobs, education & access to housing, as well as financial beneficial schemes and programmes. We particularly focus on the aspect of communities creating their own sustainable coping strategies, by specifically creating awareness and possibilities.

There is a huge tendency in the poor migrant families to overlook the aspect of skill enhancements since their everyday survival realities do not provide them with even the time to reflect on their present economic and social status. However, in the absence of formal education, their access to labour markets remain largely restricted to the unskilled informal labour markets, identifiable by low wages, insecurity and multiple safety and future concerns. This has a huge impact on the vulnerable, such as the children, and women. This is where we aim to introduce unique skills opening the doors of entrepreneurship, skill-based part-time jobs, etc.

We also hope that such interventions will be able to address the social aspects such as the employment of young girls as domestic helps or as caretakers for infants. It will also address the phenomenon of child labour, child marriages and reduce anti-social behaviour. We particularly hope to uplift the status of girls and women in such communities which can be a result of them acquiring special skills to complement their own income, status and reputation.

The strategy of SWAYAM is to first identify and enlist the family members who may benefit from the programmes under SWAYAM. We do this through our networks from SAKSHAM. Thereafter, we connect them to individual volunteers/mentors.

Together, learning specifically from the challenges of each of the families, we devise strategic skill-plans for the family members. For example, a young girl who works as a domestic help for 9-10 hours a day can enlist in computer class or English speaking class for 2-4 hours a week! Or she can explore her badminton playing skills!!

Adolescents, girls and women prefer weekly classes, to accomodate their home and work requirements. We have these on - computer, English, teaching, cooking, drama, singing, sports, entrepreneurship, painting, music, etc., taken by volunteers who contribute once a week/fortnight, thereby creating cross-beneficial opportunities for learning and personal growth.

A constant challenge is to fight the everyday struggles of the poor migrant communities for whom every minute lost and every able-abodied not working is severely detrimental to their survival in a precarious urban environment. Therefore, to leverage the utility of acquiring new skills we try to motivate them to simply de-stress by learning something new or something they are interested to know more about!

Another challenge we face is to keep the beneficiaries enrolled and not drop-out. For this purpose, we connect them with volunteers, who, besides conducting activities for them, also individually monitor their growth and potentially explore avenues for them to utilise their newly acquired skills in a beneficial way.

We aspire to have dedicated centres and staff for SWAYAM to operationalise it as a stand-alone project. For now, we conduct the programmes under SWAYAM within our main project SAKSHAM. We also aspire to have a large-scale dedicated volunteer programme which will be oriented specifically towards the various activities under SWAYAM.

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.