Prajayatna

Prajayatna has been working for the past 19 years in bringing about a systemic change in the functioning of the education system and thereby ensure quality education to all children, to enable them to live with dignity as envisaged by the organisation. The work has involved working intensively with communities, teachers, elected representatives and the bureaucracy towards institutionalising community ownership of the education development process.

Prajayatna has worked in 22 Districts of Karnataka, 1 District in Telangana, 1 district in Andhra Pradesh, 5 Districts in Rajasthan, 11 Districts in Uttar Pradesh and 3 districts in Jharkhand, reaching out to more than 10,000 schools and 4,000 Gram Panchayats where the focus has been on decentralising the governance of education through working with the Parents Committees at the school level and the Panchayats at the village, block and the district levels. The work has been subject to a great deal of attention and study. 

Besides our work on Educational Governance, The intent of the approach is to facilitate and support children’s learning through an experiential learning process, in a manner that they are able to apply what they learn in school to the various real life situations. At a primary stage the approach focuses on ‘learning how to learn’ which in turn emphasizes building 21st century life skills – to be adaptive learners throughout their lives.

Making education inclusive for all children Issues of children with disabilities have been addressed by Prajayatna in its various community processes by enabling infrastructure development for the children. Seeing the need to address the issue in a systemic manner and ensure true universalisation both in terms of enrolment and learning as well, attention is paid to ensure inclusive education for all. This is done by creating an ecosystem which is sensitive to the needs of the children with disabilities and ensure that their needs are addressed in a manner which nurtures and enhances their capabilities. Prajayatna envisages a society which enables every child to live with dignity. It aims to facilitate systemic reform towards quality education by institutionalizing processes of community ownership and developing a capability based approach to learning, to ensure that ‘every’ child is learning.

Based on our work with the schools, Prajayatna has developed an approach to working with the Anganwadis in order to ensure that children between the age group of 3 to 6 have access to quality early childhood care and education through ensuring proper governance of these centres and also by developing them into dynamic learning centres by working with the community and the teachers to ensure the holistic development of the children.

In partnership with the Department of Education and Department of Women and Child Development, Prajayatna has worked on several training and institutional development initiatives for community participation and teacher empowerment and has been and continues to be a part of several committees providing strategic inputs for enhancement of the quality of education at the State level.

We are presently working in Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand.