Education for Vulnerable Children: Innovative Experiments in Urban India

Abstract

This paper shares the innovative and cost-effective experiments for the education of marginalized children by two NGOs: Rainbow Homes and Door Step School. Rainbow Homes provides street connected girls some facilities for personalized short-term residential care with access to education similar to that of their better-positioned counterparts. It combines the benefits of the existing school infrastructure, corporate contribution, and civil society management. This paper includes their experiences across three cities—Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Delhi. Some of the major challenges in scaling up the project are identifying motivated partners, schools as well as NGOs to run the project, the need to evolve strategies for networking with other NGOs for improving the family situations etc. The Doorstep School strives for the education of children of migrant laborers, especially those on construction sites. Established in 1988, it launched a Citizens’ campaign, “EVERY CHILD COUNTS Campaign (ECCC),” to enroll all 6–7-year-old children in the city of Pune in school by June 2012. The organization built its program to address three major problems: Non-Enrollment, Wastage, and Stagnation. NGOs, social groups, corporate offices, institutes, the media, builders, the Government and citizen volunteers partnered with the Campaign team, to enroll a large number of marginalized children in schools. Both the organizations believe in achieving the 4-As in education through their projects by making education Acceptable, Available, Accessible, and Adaptable to children who are otherwise likely to be excluded from the formal education system. These models have the potential for scaling up with local context-specific modifications.