Help us in giving tribal children the high quality education they deserve

Dadhre is a small tribal village in the lush forests of Western ghats, a few hours away from Mumbai. Here, QUEST runs a school-plus program called Shikshan Samruddhi Kendra where QUEST trained Balamitra teach tribal children to read, write, count, reason, think and express.

In its almost two decades of work QUEST has enriched the learning experience of over 3 lakh children, most from rural and tribal communities, through various programs. All our programs are built on the foundation of ideas and insights from our SSKs. Thus, the children from our SSKs play a special role in QUEST because working with them helps us learn how to effectively teach young children from rural and tribal communities.

We are seeking your support for our Shikshan Samruddhi Kendras. Here our children learn language and math, our team learns the craft of teaching, our researchers learn about pedagogy, and our supporters learn about the impact our programs can have on children’s lives. 

Children are naturally curious and born to learn. Yet, millions of children in rural and tribal areas struggle to acquire basic skills in language and math necessary for formal schooling. Why? Because there is a gap between children’s everyday life, their culture and what happens in classrooms.

When education is connected to children’s everyday lives, children’s true potential begins to flourish. For example, when a Balmitra uses children’s experience of catching and selling fish to create a word problem involving addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division they have their answers ready quickly. Or, when the Balmitra brings in wild vegetables from the forest into the SSK, children write excellent recipes for using the vegetables in various local dishes.

In our SSKs, Balmitras start their careers in education and become teachers or work as professionals in QUEST or other NGOs in the sector. SSKs are also sites where budding educators in our Fellowship programs observe and practice teaching.

In SSKs our researchers apply knowledge in fields like pedagogy and cognitive science to create new learning resources or classroom activities and design new models to enhance teaching practices which can benefit all young children in India.