Samarthya: Our Work & The Role Of Incubators

“Democratic governance needs the citizen to be legally empowered to ask questions, file complaints and be a part of the corrective process”

The above quote is by Aruna Roy from an article that was published in The Hindu recently.

In the case of a government school, the stakeholders who need to become legally empowered to ask questions become the principal, the teachers, the parents and the students. We believe that in the system of a school the parents and the students are the 2 most important stakeholders who have to hold the political executive and implementing agencies to account.

At Samarthya, in the last 2 years, we have spent over 600 hours on the ground working closely with parents. Our effort has been one of informing parents about the rights that are guaranteed to their children in the age group of 6 to 14 years under the Right To Free and Compulsory Education Act of 2009. We accompanied this information with support. Support in actually reporting and solving any child right violations in the school. Even though the results are still preliminary but are magnificent.

It was hard for us to imagine what parents will do when they truly understand and embrace the scope and power of their citizenship. We have seen parents come together, arrange for volunteers and space to facilitate extra classes for students who needed it the most. We have seen them help the school with admissions. We have seen them visiting kitchens where mid-day meals are made, we have seen them hold teachers, the principal’s, the government and even their fellow parents to account.

But neither the parents’ journey nor our journey has been easy. Our relationship with our work has been tipsy topsy as any other committed relationship. Every few months we have asked ourselves the critical questions, “Where is it going?” “Do we have a future?” “Will this work?” Dealing with these questions has been hard for us but we have been fortunate enough to have received the support of incubators such as Edumentum, Innovated and UnLtd. Time and again, these incubators have helped us find answer to these questions and sometimes have even asked us the questions we are too scared to ask ourselves.

Edumentum’s focus on program theory has helped us understand the things we need to do to support the hypothesis for our program. It has helped us define our outcomes, our activities and our success criteria.

InnovatED has held our hand and made us see the the various aspects of organization building — what we at InnovatED like to call the 6 P’s (Proposition, People, Proceeds, Processes, Partnerships and Promotion). We have seen experts, established entrepreneurs and eminent personalities (3 E’s) talk about and show us what focusing of each of these 6 P’s really means.

UnLtd Delhi has provided local support, helped us make local connections which in turn has helped us develop a contextual solution.

What’s common with all the 3 incubators is mentors they have connected us with and the peer network of entrepreneurs. It has been so inspiring and there has been so much to learn from fellow entrepreneurs. The energy, the zeal, the commitment in a room full of entrepreneurs is jaw dropping. With usually small teams and big dreams these entrepreneurs show so much courage.

Courage is also shown by a mother who is barely allowed to speak at home but finds her voice in the school when it’s about the children of her neighborhood. Commitment is also shown by a parent who has a job which starts at 8 AM but manages to still be in the school at 7:30 AM to see if all the students and teachers are being punctual. But it hasn’t been easy.

When you don’t hear back from a government agency for 3 months, when a case file is closed without the case actually being solved, when parents are threatened with consequences for their own child when they are trying to do good work for all children, it is difficult to persist and sustain hope. The parents still persisting is a testament of the strength of these people’s character. At Samarthya, we do whatever we can do to support these parents fight the larger demons that haunt our bungled public education system.

You can visit us on www.samarthya.co.

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