How to educate a village... about education? An impressive example from India!

Sue & I talking about GEN's work

How does it feel like to not be able to read and understand what is written in front of you? I don't know, but I can merely assume that looking through a book when you are illiterate is like biting into a juicy nectarine without being able to taste the sweetness and wonderful moist texture this fruit has to offer. I am used to speaking and reading multiple languages and I am physically uncomfortable in places where I don't understand what's being said or written in front of me. So... not being able to read or write ANYTHING truly scares the life out of me just thinking about it! Yet, there are millions of people around the world who are illiterate and live their entire lives without being able to read or write. Most of them mainly because of the complete lack of resources for education and, some of them, because they are stopped from learning because they are...girls! What magical power would one have to have in order to be able to change people’s minds and traditions they’ve had for generations against letting girls study?!

Rachna, Sue and Vinod with the girls

Well, my friend Sue Burke, the Chair of GEN (Grassroots Empowerment Network) and her colleague Vinod Kaushik from EP (Ending Poverty) - GEN’s partner organisation in India, certainly must have a magic wand, as I can’t see how otherwise they could have achieved what they did in such a short amount of time (2 ½ years) in some of the poorest villages in the world! GEN was set up to help people in India - but is based in the UK. It shares its tasks with EP in a very simple yet efficient way: GEN does the fundraising and networking in the UK and EP delivers the work on the ground, with real people, with real problems, in India! Without EP, I would think GEN would find it rather difficult to do grassroots community development via SKYPE with rural communities... in India! 

Discussions with the village

So, how do you change the minds of whole villages?


First, you have to speak to them and find out about their issues, what bothers them and what they feel they need and create a relationship with the community. There is no point going directly into a village and telling them what you think their issues are when they don’t even know you. Unless you can read minds to know exactly what they are thinking of, they won’t care about what you say (even if it’s completely true!) and will probably take you for the village idiot or the local joker at best!

Plus, “people sell to people” and relationships are important, even (more so!) in community work. One still has to be able to “sell” (a new idea, a new concept, a change of some kind) as everyone is interested in “profit”. In community work, I call it “social profit” – for me, this is a community’s <what’s-in-it-for-me> unasked question and in order to work with them productively we have to find the balance between what we think is “good change” and what they want.

Girls from the village

Vinod and his team from EP initially went into 5 different villages and spoke to villagers to find out what their needs and issues were. He formed relationships with the locals, particularly the people whose opinions and advice others respected and followed in the village. He then encouraged them to form Village Development Groups (VDGs) of about 10 members – one in each village, made up of people thought highly of from that village, who were willing to work with EP in tackling the needs and issues identified in the initial surveys.

So far so good, but by this point EP and GEN still haven’t brought up the issue around girl’s education, let alone change the villagers’ minds about it...

Eye camp

Second, you show a sign of good will, a sign that you are trustworthy and people can rely on you and

that your word is worth something! First things first – people won’t care about a few girls’ education until at least some of their basic needs are met, so you address these first - it’s often a way into the community and an easy quick win! So in March 2010 Vinod, Sue and their teams organised a stakeholder meet for all the VDGs and local leaders (around 70 people) to get to know each other better, and to do more work on identifying village priorities and plans and explore how these could be met.

A big surprise to them all, including the villagers, was how many of their priorities could already be met by themselves, without any external help! In these cases it was more than anything else a question of getting organised, something the VDGs could do themselves. I find it astonishing how sometimes just looking at the same issues in a different context, with different eyes and perhaps with external input, we can often find unexpectedly simple solutions!

Stakeholder Meeting

The stakeholder meeting encompassed a traditional water ceremony (by which all attendees committed to a fruitful meeting) as well as raising key issues through entertaining and engaging methods (such as role-play) and this helped immensely to build understanding and trust between GEN, EP and the villagers. Moreover, a local political leader attended and was able to facilitate finding practical ways of meeting some of the villagers' identified needs. All of these things helped to build GEN & EP’s credibility because until then the area had been at the very edge of the political map. GEN and EP took the opportunity of this successful event and raised the prospect of a girls' education project.

With GEN's support, EP also organised two eye camps where nearly 800 people, including children, had eye examinations, sight tests, were given glasses as required and were checked for cataracts. Then 70 people, mostly elderly villagers, underwent successful cataract surgery. Now, how’s that for a first promise kept?!

Girls with Teacher in the village

Third – Involve the community in your objectives (The WHAT)
Having got villagers' agreement to proceeding with the girls' education project, members from the VDGs helped recruit village women with some education as teachers to deliver the training to nearly 30 girls in each village. 

EP provided these women with basic training and support in taking on their new roles. Teachers are supported by regular visits from the EP team. They are not only responsible for the girls' education, but also for keeping a track of the girls' progress and finding out why they do not attend classes. This makes the teachers responsible not just for delivering the curriculum, but also to maintain a relationship with the girls and their families. 

Because GEN and EP wanted to ensure the education was relevant to the girls' life situation, they designed a curriculum to cover basic literacy and numeracy, but also other areas of interest varying from women's health to legal rights and sewing skills.

Fourth – Methodology and Approach (The HOW) 
Most things in life that truly work are about the proper approach and methodology: it’s often not what you say, but THE WAY you say it! 

Learning in this class is engaging

But how and where do you start to educate girls aged 10 to 14 who have never, ever had any kind of training or education? This was the challenge faced by EPs education expert, Rachna Singh who designed the 6 month programme which is delivered through fun and entertaining classes in a semi-structured way. They use various creative teaching methods which linked the classes’ content to things that the girls know (or carry out in their daily lives), such as storytelling and sharing traditional knowledge. 

Her design was based on the following principles: 

• deliver basic literacy and numeracy which uses material from their village world; 
• teach them about women’s health  - because the teenage girls who participated are considered to be of marriage age in rural India, 
• teach environmental education covering: tree planting, composting, tree garden development – because they all work and take care of households 
• teach them new skills - sewing - so they can make clothes and other things for theirs and their families' needs
• use art as a creative contrast to the more rigorous work of literacy and numeracy and 
• know your legal rights - in a community where others try to decide for you the most important things in life, it is quite an asset to know about your fundamental legal rights, your rights related to education, child marriage/dowry, parental property rights, Atrocity Act and so on.

Sewing classes: learning and earning!

What GEN and EP aim to do is empower these girls; not just tell them about their A-B-Cs (or equivalent letters in Hindi). They want to help the girls understand, critically analyse & recognise their life choices, hence the wider curriculum developed to address social (health, legal rights), occupational & environmental education especially tailored to the situation and the needs of the girls.

A new and initially unplanned outcome is that the sewing skills learned by the girls have led to the development of them producing marketable craft work – bags, pouches, table mats and quilts – which can be sold thus bringing the girls an income, and reassuring their families that participation in the classes has been worthwhile. GEN provided funds for purchase of good quality materials, plus an opportunity for the girls to go and look at craft items produced by other village women. EP provided advice and guidance on how to produce desirable items for sale, and increasingly GEN and EP are helping to find marketing outlets both in nearby cities in India and in UK.

Girls asked for dancing sessions

For me, a clear sign that GEN and EP are achieving this key aim of theirs (empowerment) is that after a few months in the course (this course lasts 6 months, 6 days/week, 2h/day - at times that fit in with the girls' other family and agricultural responsibilities) the girls themselves started asking for other things they wanted to learn about or do during classes, for example dancing, games and sport sessions. Before, the teacher could barely get them to say a few words and now it’s like they’ve been given the key to finding a new side of themselves, something that happened because of this relatively small education initiative.

Quilt built by the girls in the village

What I truly love about this project is not only that those girls have (as a result of even basic education) a new outlook on life, but also that they have been able to show the adults that they were able to bring income into the family by using skills they learnt in class. Moreover, the adults in the villages have now asked for evening classes for themselves! This shows a complete shift in their attitude around education, not only for their daughters, but also for themselves! What was the magic sparkle that changed their attitudes? Perhaps seeing all the wider benefits that came out of this initiative, not only for their daughters but also for the rest of the village:

Bags made by the girls

• as a result of learning new sewing skills, the girls were able to create craft work (some bags and quilts) which generated income for them and their families 
• the girls who have finished the 6 months course now asked for more advanced education and some of them have gone back to do the 6 months course again in a more senior position, helping the other student girls. 
• as a result of the AGM where all the VDGs were brought together by GEN and EP, the MP (Member of Parliament) representative for the region spoke personally to members from all the villages involved and was able to bring practical changes into their villages which improved their quality of life (government installed water pumps and it is now looking at developing education committees in each village). 
• other NGOs (non-governmental organisations) in India have asked GEN and EP to provide support as paid consultancy (thus generating income for these NGOs to do more work) so that they can replicate GEN & EP’s learning model 
• now 15 more villages want education classes!