Digital Community Classrooms for Underprivileged Students

According to the ministry of human resource development 2018 report, 62.1 million children are out of school in India. There are bridging mechanisms for out-of-school children at the elementary stage, however, they are absent for secondary education. Hence children, especially girls, find it difficult to re-enter education once they have dropped out. Traditional gender norms push girls into helping with household chores and sibling care, leading to irregular attendance that eventually results in dropouts. Early marriage, lack of safety in schools and low aspirations related to girls’ education also lead to them dropping out. This poses a great challenge for achieving the global sustainable development goals and 100% literacy by 2030 in India. 

In order to ensure that students are motivated to continue their education, Relearn Foundation has been working tirelessly to establish community classrooms in Eastern India under the flagship Digital Literacy Mission. Through this mechanism, we ensure that students do not drop out and are afforded a childhood of fun, games and learning. Childhood is an important psychological development stage in the lives of human beings for proper integration into society. However, it is unfairly afforded only to children coming from affluent societies. Through our work, we want to ensure that childhood is afforded by all despite economic backgrounds. This development also ensures that students have more learning potential and are more employable.

Remote learning has become a prerequisite within a very short period due to the COVID-19 crisis. However, the infrastructural requirements for remote learning have been vastly inept due to a lack of access to resources such as laptops and basic literacy. School management needs to understand whether teachers and students have the required devices and internet connectivity to successfully use remote learning tools. But, the reality is even in the 21st century, millions of underprivileged students from poor families cannot access the internet. Our aim is to be able to provide the infrastructure which is required to increase the quality of skills in students.

Through our foundation, we aim to install digital community classroom facilities in 8 centres to help students appearing for higher secondary examinations and competitive examinations for professional courses. It is expected that this facility will help in reducing child marriage and by receiving professional degrees/diplomas the girl students will be able to get jobs and become financially independent. This will encourage more women's participation in the workforce and thereby decrease the gender gap in our society.

Through our work, we are providing quality education to students from underprivileged backgrounds. Further, we are giving educated women a financial means through which they can be financially independent. We are helping children to have space where they can learn in a fun environment through games like word games and maths games. In this way, we have been able to reduce absenteeism and school dropout.