Help 3,500 Girls Like Pragati Stay In School

Smirti is 15 years old and in 2018 joined our residential hostel for girls in Pune, enabling her to access education on a regular basis. Smirti's family live in a slum with her parents and one younger brother. Her family are very poor and live on $350 per year. This forces them to live in a particularly difficult environment as they cannot afford to live anywhere else.

Like many aspirational families in India, Smirti's parents enrolled her in an English medium school. However, as a Marathi speaker, she struggled to adjust to learning in another language and fell more and more behind. When she was 13 years old, she fell in with a bad crowd and lost interest in education. She stopped attending school and was living a chaotic life, not keeping care of her appearance and helping out with chores at home. The particular slum her family were living in is known for being a dangerous area and her parents decided that the only way to give Smirti a chance at a more positive future was to get her out of that environment.

Due to dropping out of school she is 2 years behind in her studies and as such is studying in 7th rather than 9^th which is the appropriate one for her age. To address her lack of confidence in her educational abilities, our team of dedicated wardens have been giving her a lot of one to one support and encouraging her to have confidence in taking a step-by-step approach to her learning and that by doing this she will improve. She has been enrolled in an excellent school close to the hostel and the school teacher is also giving her extra support to develop her academic skills. This is alongside the regular programme of educational support the hostel provides for all girls - daily tuition in English, Maths and Science, supervised study sessions, group learning, study skills methods and much more.

In six months, Smirti's confidence has grown a lot. Activities like e-learning, memory development games have given her tangible examples of her progress. We have seen leadership skills develop in her and growth in her marks.She is also active in hostel level tuition activity. She feels very comfortable in class and her attendance record in school is now perfect.

Due to Smirti's past behaviour, her father was not willing for his daughter to continue in education beyond the age of 16. However, this view has now changed as he has seen the positive progress and changes in her behaviour since joining our hostel programme. He feels much more confident about his daughter's future and the family is feeling stress free. Smirti now aims to be an IPS officer so alongside her education she's also taking care of her fitness, getting involved in the karate and zumba classes at the hostel. She is very happy and feeling positive about her future.