What Role Do Community-Driven Education Models Play in Shaping Rural Schools?

Building an institute of quality education is an uphill task, and can also be said to be a battle at some places. It often involves numerous individuals due to high resource requirements. Hence, strong community involvement is a factor that can lay the foundation of sustainable education practices. 

Throughout the globe, it has been observed that when community participation is high, education seems to develop both in quality and quantity. That is, more volunteers, funding and resources are available alongside a higher number of schools, making it easier to break barriers standing in the way of making quality education accessible. 

Even today various initiatives like ‘Chaduvula Panduga’ (festival of education) from Andhra Pradesh involve community members on a large scale. Programs like ‘Alokar Jatra’ in Assam also bring together local communities to conduct a survey determining a local level database of children’s educational status and its positive impact on access and enrollment. However, even these positive initiatives are not able to reach far and wide. But the need for them still sustains due to the various benefits they provide like proper maintenance of schools and management and planning of educational reforms. 

Our Approach to Change and Its Sustainable Impact 

Knowing this, we ensured that our education- model to increase the access of primary education even in the most geographical remote areas brings the community together. With partnership with the state governments of eight states we were able to make a change across 1.30 lakh rural schools. This change was possible only due to the involvement of students, parents, administrators, and teachers, on varying levels. 

When teachers were able to learn from our volunteers (SPARKs) on how to operate our innovations, they were able to include them in their classroom making the learning time more engaging and effective. This provided us with rapid scalability. When paired alongside Sampark Partner Dashboard, an innovation that monitors our Sampark Smartshala Program, we are able to monitor and assess impact with total transparency. It provides all partners with a clear view of resource location and utilisation against key performance indicators and milestones. 

Over the past two decades these dashboards have been able to track over 1 million students and teachers and enabled us to reduce strain on teachers with our digital innovative solutions. This tool helped us improve in addressing area specific issues by 50%. 

As these issues got resolved a wave of resounding positive impact followed. The parents were able to have faith in the education system and became more committed to their child’s academic progress, leading to a big 60% increase in awareness of their child’s academic achievements. This positive change brought a 16% increase in children’s attendance rates and 32% jump in academic scores. 

Contribute to The Transformation of Rural Communities 

This community-centric transformation plays a major role in development of rural areas as better academic outcomes unlock doors to better life opportunities. You can also be a part of a community that drives the change in providing a better future to the upcoming generations. Just reach out to us and become a volunteer today!