Gujarat

I flew to Delhi from Patna last night, and this afternoon flew to Ahmedabad-- quick, cross-country traveling! I reached the Pratham Gujarat office around 6pm and sat with State Head Deepak Dogra, who explained how Pratham Gujarat has taken a different approach to summer camps than anywhere else in the country.

For over a year the Gujarat state Sarva Shiksa Abhiyan Ministry (with the mission to make sure all children are enrolled in school) has focused on enrolling 5 year-old children into Standard I (Std I--1st grade-- which children usually enter at the age of 6) in order to reduce the number of 6 year-olds out of school. Like it or not, this new policy has been successful, as demonstrated by the 33% increase of 5 year-olds enrolled in government schools shown in the table "In pre-school (Balwadi/Anganwadi) or in school 2006 vs. 2007" on page 119 of the ASER 2007 Report.

In order to complement the government's approach Pratham Gujarat has chosen to focus its summer campaign on ensuring that these 5 year-olds are sufficiently prepared when they enter Std I. So this summer Pratham's objective is to make 5 year-old children who will be entering Std I in mid-June (soon) proficient in reading letters and identifying numbers.

But how? Pratham's answer in Gujarat is to train government Anganwadi (kindergarten) workers with Pratham techniques. In April, with the permission of the Gujarat state government, Pratham trained approximately 35,000 Anganwadi workers all across Gujarat. The workers, who work in about 18,000 villages, were also supplied with Pratham-created Teaching Learning Material (TLM) distributed to the anganwadi workers by the state of Gujarat.

It will be interesting visiting Anganwadis after seeing only summer camps to this point. I'll be in Gujarat for the next 2 days and will write soon on what I see.

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