Education India Project #5828

Providing Education & Training to Women in India

by Action Change (Formerly GVI Trust)

Project Report | Aug 30, 2018
Supporting Our Partners Through Our Summer Programmes and More!

By Paul Whitehouse | Program Manager

Dear Supporters,

The focus of this quarter has been providing support for our project partners during the holiday period by running Summer Programmes in various schools and community centres around Ernakulum. In addition to this we have also run Gender Equality workshops in schools and with community groups, helped with capacity building amongst teachers, supported the vocational unit of a school for people with special educational needs, run an awareness raising campaign for a child advocacy centre in Fort Kochi, and built more vegetable gardens for our project partners.

Between April and July lots of our project partners need extra support, as it’s a holiday period for most schools in Kerala. This year GVI Kerala assisted by conducting Summer Programmes in local schools and community centres. The objective of a summer programme is for students to learn all about communication, teamwork, planning, idea generation, and time-management. They do this by working closely with our volunteers, who act as their champions and mentors, setting creative challenges for the students to solve as a team, over a two week period. The students then present a final showcase of their learning to their parents at the end of the programme. The summer programmes that we ran this year were a huge success and helped support our hub objective of enabling the absolute development of children and young adults in Kerala by providing support and training in life skill based education. The project also directly contributed to the 4^th Sustainable Development goal: Ensuring Inclusive and quality education for all and promoting lifelong learning.

Another highlight of the last few months has been the building of vegetable gardens in one of our local schools. With support from the GVI trust, our volunteers have helped to build three vegetable gardens for our project partners over the last few months. Each school in Kerala is required

to have a vegetable garden to help sustain itself and provide the students with healthy school meals. In helping build these vegetable gardens we have contributed towards the 3^rd Sustainable Development Goal by Ensuring healthy lives and promoting wellbeing for all at all ages.

In addition to these initiatives, GVI has also been working with groups of students from both Duke University and Ohio State University in the USA, to help deliver our programmes. The students from Duke University helped to design and deliver Gender Equality and Consent workshops to teenage boys and girls at one of our partner schools. The workshops were designed to address topics such as gender roles and consent. Sex education is often a required part of school curriculums throughout the world. Unfortunately this is not always the case and certainly not always in India. In a report written by the Youth Coalition for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, in India “Most schools – private and public affiliated with state boards of secondary education do not have any form of sexuality education in their curricula.” The workshops we ran focused on numerous topics, with gender equality, the differences between sex and gender, body parts and gender stereotypes being introduced at different stages. The pupils were engaged through interactive activities, small and large group discussions, creative sessions and role-plays. This project directly contributed towards the 5^th Sustainable Development Goal of achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls.

The Ohio State group helped us with the restructuring and rebranding of the vocational unit at one of our partner schools for people with special educational needs. In assisting the vocational unit, we helped create a business plan, improved the marketing and promoted the products that were being created. We also increased awareness, improved systems for record keeping and analysis of data, increased profits, and developed tools to assist the teachers in implementing their new business plan. Alongside the new business plan we also ran full day training sessions for the teachers and developed a “how to” manual so that staff would be able to more effectively manage the new business.

In the last few months we have helped develop really strong relationships with our project partners, supporting them to support themselves, with human empowerment at the centre of everything that we do. This is definitely the direction that we intend on continuing in, with the aim of impact an sustainability at the heart of our programmes. Your help and support has enabled us to create stronger programmes, whilst empowering communities. We will keep you updated with further programme developments. Your continued support is very much appreciated and really helps to make a difference. Thank you, over and over again!

With Gratitude,

GVI India Community Team

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Apr 17, 2018
St Georges School Refurbishments

By Paul Whitehouse | Project Leader

Dear Supporters,

We’ve had a really strong start to 2018 here at GVI Kerala, with some exciting projects getting underway, some new partnerships forming, as well as some positive developments in our long term projects too. Here is a snap shot of what we have been up to:

Last month we finished a complete refurbishment of a school on the outskirts of Cochin. GVI staff and volunteers from Stelly Secondary School worked alongside local labourers to design and build a playground and two vegetable gardens and to install a double gate as well as rebuilding and painting the perimeter walls. These actions have made St Georges School more accessible, provided play facilities and improved education in hygiene thereby helping GVI to progress towards the long term objective “to enable the absolute development of children and young adults in Kerala by providing support and training in life skills base education’’.

In addition to this, we’ve also recently constructed a new English lab at Mujahid school to create a new space where children can learn, express themselves and practice their spoken English to be called the ‘Mujahid English Lab’. We’ve also been working with the parents of the students at SDPY Boys Upper Secondary school, delivering workshops to help them support their children during stressful exam periods. The workshops have been very well attended, and cover a basic explanation of exam stress, the causes, impacts, symptoms and what the parents can do to help support their child and relieve some of the stressful pressure. Overall they have been very well received.

As well as our work with schools, we’ve also been working to develop our partnerships with more women’s groups and community groups. We’ve already set up two new partnerships this year and we are happy to say these partnerships are already flourishing

These projects are just some of the amazing things that we have planned and delivered this year – keep watching this space to see what 2018 has in store for us

With Gratitude,

GVI India, Kerala

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Jan 17, 2018
Plant Smiles, Grow Laughter and Harvest Love

By Helen Mulgan | GVI Kerala, Base Manager

Dear Supporters,

In short, 2017 has flown by. Overall it’s been a great year for developing our projects on the ground in Kerala, seeing us build multiple new partnerships and initiate as many as 5 new projects in the last quarter of the year alone!

In the last three months we’ve been focusing heavily on nourishing the integral pillars that support children in their education; parents, teachers and community. In October last year we began working with the teachers of a local boy’s secondary school. In total 16 teachers joined our classes, which seek to empower them to use English in their lessons more effectively and feel confident in delivering classes to their students. These lessons are short but fun with great attendance receiving excellent feedback, ultimately our objective is to improve the quality of education being delivered to students and increase the engagement and commitment of the teachers. In just three months we’ve already seen an increase in confidence and English speaking ability – plus the teachers are highly motivated and competitive, which makes for lively debates in class!

December in Kerala not only means a month of festive celebrations for Christmas but also a heavy exam period for students in both primary and secondary schools. During this time we usually pull back from our regular life-skill based classes with children to allow them to focus on their academic studies. This gives us a chance to focus on nurturing another pillar of support – their parents. In December 2017 we delivered 3 separate classes for parents that aimed to increase their awareness about how to support their children with ‘Exam Stress’. The workshops focused on areas like; ensuring good nutrition, healthy sleep cycles, the benefits of having breaks, emotional support and much more! These workshops were immensely well received by parents, many of whom gave feedback like:

“I only ever think about getting my son to study, I never thought about how he was feeling or if he was stressed – I will change my attitude from now on and give more support to him.”

In fact, these classes got so much positive feedback that we were invited back to one school to deliver this again to over 300 parents. What an achievement for our team (and a bit nerve wracking too!)

Finally we are proud to report the completion of two new vegetable gardens at our partner who runs a home for about 52 girls, supporting them with pastoral care and facilitating their education. The school and home had two excellent spaces for growing plants and vegetables but due to lack of funding were only able to operate a small garden using grow bags which limit growth and often do not survive the monsoon season. Working with in field volunteers we were able to build two new vegetable gardens with as many as 7 beds for growing vegetables which could be used in the meals served to the staff and children.

Only 1 month after completion of this project the garden is flourishing, growing vegetables like spinach, green beans, cauliflower, aubergine, okra, chilly and tomatoes. Staff at the home are passionate about maintaining the garden and have even developed their own organic pesticides that keep the bugs at bay without compromising the quality of the vegetables and the health of the girls! Most importantly some of the girls are taking an interest in maintaining the gardens, demonstrating patience, care and commitment and learning new skills too.

As with everything we do, setting up new projects takes time, effort, commitment and patience from our team of staff and volunteers on the ground. Without the financial support we receive through GlobalGiving and The GVI Trust, it would be difficult for us to imagine growth of this nature and nearly impossible for us to make it happen. A huge thank you to all of those who supported us in 2017 – watch this space to see what 2018 has in store for us.

With Gratitude,

GVI India

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