A foundation stone to build a beautiful life and career of the woman is education and educating a girl child is the first step towards all-round development of woman. Hence, MSS put its emphasis to ensure joyful learning environment for girl child. To provide better and quality education to the girl child, we started Girl Child Learning Centers “Hamari Beti Shiksha Kendra” in 116 villages of two states Uttarakhand and Himachal at District Dehradun and Sirmour respectively for 4 years.
The focus of the Girl Child Learning Centres program was to create a nurturing and supportive environment for out of school girl children between the ages of 6-14 years and to sufficiently educate them and help them enroll in mainstream schools. We were teaching more than 3500 out of school girls and out of which more than 2500 girls were sent to mainstream schools. Beside this, we sensitized them on health, nutrition and gender issues including their rights. We wish to continue and expand this initiative in the villages and slums of Dehradun in Uttarakhand and villages of Himachal Pradesh, targeting mainly out of school girls of weaker section of the society.
I. Survey and Identification of project villages
45 villages of Vikasnagar and Sahaspur blocks were visited and surveyed to identify girls between the ages of 6-14 years who were primary school dropouts or those who had never been to school.
Of these 45 villages, 30 were selected on the basis of meeting the criteria of having a minimum of 30 such slow learner girls in a particular village.
Mamta Staff then verified these surveys and met with the girls enrolled in the learning centres in each of these 30 villages.
II. Selection of Teachers and finalisation of centre locations
Once the 30 villages with slow learner girls were identified and verified, teachers for these centres were found. These teachers were local girls and women living in and around Vikasnagar and Sahaspur block.
A key feature of the project is that the physical location of the learning centre must be contributed by the village community themselves. This helps build among the community the need to prioritize girl child education.
