The BRIDGE Fellowship

According to UNESCO, 47 million children drop out after 10th class and 6 million at the primary level in India. Gurugram has close to 20,000 out of school dropouts. Why? Children and parents lack vision for themselves and don’t question the status quo. This is further worsened as the existing education system doesn’t cater to children's socio-emotional needs. So most of these dropout children grow up into unskilled unemployed youth or get involved in anti-social activities.

Malini was a dropout from school. She enrolled in Anubhuti learning centre, underwent conceptual building, and was re-enrolled into formal school. She again dropped out in a few months. Her parents, siblings, or teachers weren’t interested to know why. Even educated youth graduates and high school pass-outs in the community were not talking about it. Through surveys, Anubhuti found that out of every 4 children there is 1 Malini. The root cause is that these stakeholders aren’t aware of the seriousness of dropping out and making uninformed decisions as they don’t envision a future with education. 

We understood that educating Malini alone in an innovative manner isn’t a sustainable solution. Educating, creating awareness, and building capacities for teachers, parents, local youth is equally important. 

Anubhuti is an NGO creating a movement of local youth by empowering them to be changemakers by bridging these gaps between children, parents, teachers, siblings, and so on, and prevent children like Malini from dropping out.  

Sapna is one of 10 BRIDGE fellows we have selected from the local community itself where Malini lives. Why local youth like Sapna? Young adults from the same or nearby neighbourhoods of dropout children like Malini, know them, their parents, neighbours, teachers personally, have the best ability in persuasion and social influence, bring the community together and create sustainable change.

In this 2-year Fellowship, Sapna goes through rigorous processes and learns about different approaches under 3C’s model (Classroom intervention, community mobilization, capacity building). She will be enabling teachers to not only use innovative teaching methods but understand the socio-emotional needs of children like Malini also. She lives close to Malini and knows her parents, their cultural dynamics, socio-financial problems. Anubhuti envisions Sapna as a self-aware, interpersonally aware, problem-solving visionary youth who’ll empower others to drive systemic level change after graduating from BRIDGE fellowship. BRIDGE is a full collaboration with the Haryana government giving us access to all the government schools in the state.

Despite the full collaboration with the Haryana Government, Anubhuti has restricted itself to 10 schools in the Sona Block of Gurugram in order to prove the success of our BRIDGE model before scaling up state level. Out of the 150 applications, we had selected 10 fellows through a rigorous selection process. The BRIDGE Fellows are given maximum exposure by attaching each fellow to 1 school, 7 teachers, and 300 children, all from the nearby communities.

It will help Anubhuti’s yearly expenses indirectly impacting school retention and learning of 10000 dropout children in model classrooms by empowering 10 local BRIDGE fellows in becoming change-makers. These fellows will collaborate with stakeholders to enable an equal voice for children’s education and strengthen the school processes.

All these efforts culminate into joyful classrooms and model schools that could be used to demonstrate successful strategies to tackle the issue of child dropouts from formal schooling. This model can be used by various governments for replication. Through BRIDGE, Anubhuti fills the gaps between the schools and community through a sustainable, and scalable model of equitable grassroots change in education at the systemic level.