Education Outlook for Gujarat

• Though school enrollment is up to 95% in rural Gujarat, learning levels remain shockingly low. 55% of rural students in Standard 5 cannot read a Std. 2 level text, and 65% of these students cannot do simple subtraction.
• In many cities in Gujarat (as across India), children of migrant laborers suffer not only from poor school quality but also from the disruption of constant
  movement, and therefore limited school attendance.

Pratham in Gujarat this Year

Read India

• Gujarat’s Block Excellence Programmes (BEPs) cover 10 blocks across the state, in addition to a District Resource Centre (DRC) programme in Surendranagar. These classes emphasize basic literacy and numeracy, with close monitoring for learning outcomes and improvement, to ensure that weak students receive the support they need to achieve in school. In recent months, the program in Surendranagar has focused on an informal partnership with the government’s Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), training preschool teachers to provide engaging,activity-based opportunities for early childhood learning.
• Pratham’s efforts extend beyond the classroom, reaching parents, volunteers, officials through meetings and melas to encourage communities to focus outcomes. Gujarat has piloted the 1 Rupee Testing Program, in which their children are tested in reading and math. This helps parents to see needs, and often leads them to enroll their children in Read India classes activityvolunteers, and local on learning parents watch as their children’s classes.
• The Education for Education (EFE) program is currently being rolled out across 6 districts of Gujarat’s Read India program, so that volunteers will be able to to engage in regular computer classes in exchange for teaching Read India classes in their villages.

Urban Programs

Coverage: 286 Centers in the neediest areas of 3 cities
Children Reached: 9162 Children

• Pratham provides the neediest children of the slums of Ahmedabad, Baroda, and Surat with critical support, through both fee-based and sponsored learning centers. Urban programs in Gujarat have been particularly successful at targeting female students, who are often under-served by government schools and whose education might be overlooked by parents without Pratham’s encouragement and outreach.

Government Partnership in Gujarat

• After a highly-successful remedial learning program run by Pratham in cooperation with the state government, Pratham has signed an MoU with the Gujarat education department, the SSA, to develop Pragnya, a state-wide activity-based learning program, which includes curriculum design, training of teachers and government officials, teachinglearning materials, and constant support and monitoring at the ground level. The program has been piloted in 258 schools, and will be scaled up to 2500 schools across the state in June 2011.