Ensuring Quality Education for Poor Children
We strive to ensure good standard of education and health for impoverished rural and urban slum children towards their holistic development. This we do through off the school tuitions and nutritional food through Kitchen Garden Promotion.
Education & skill development are the most fundamental pillars of a functional society. We have been working among children from the villages and the slums of Chennai city who are the deprived most to help them avail the basic rights to lead to a secured future through wholesome education. We help by ensuring them quality education through – tutorial assistance on class room subjects, basic life skills and nutritional supplement for comprehensive growth . So far a total of 15000 poor children have been provided quality education since 1995. And around 2000 backyard kitchen gardens have been developed by the children of ESCs.
Similarly rural youth are guided towards well paid jobs by supporting them to complete vocational skill courses. This is done through supporting the youth in the day to day expense of Travel cost and Nutritious lunch., and as many as 550 youth have been facilitated to be trained in vocational skills and placed in remunerative jobs
General & region specific Causes that necessitate Our Interventions.
In the first place, the parents of a vast majority of children in the villages and the slums are unable to assist their wards in their studies in any way. With the new approach to education that calls for assistance at home on what was studied in the School, the children from villages and slums of towns find it extremely difficult to cope with. And they can not afford to pay for private tuitions either. SPPD has been involved promoting their cause since the very days of its formation in the year 1995. Some of the more specific causes that necessitate the intervention.
- The standard of education is very poor among the children belonging to these sections.
- General awareness levels on a variety of matters that are essential in day to day life such as personal hygiene, road safety, environment, child trafficking and climate change etc are very pathetic indeed.
- The children in general in the state of Tamilnadu are underweight and malnourished and the condition of rural children is still worse with very poor nutritional food intake. And this poor nutritional status affects their academic performance in a big way and gets reflected in levels of their concentration and attentiveness in the class room and studies in general.
- There is a high level of forced migration of parents in search of work. necessitated by the declining farming activities due to successive years of drought conditions. Most of such parents leave their children behind in the care of others like relatives
- Many children grow up here with their parents working in neighbourhood towns or even in faraway places. This involuntary migration is sought in most of the rural and urban areas with the aim to escape from unemployment, social discrimination and natural disasters.
These ‘home alone’ children of parents of forced migration are left without attention, become early drop outs from school, more likely to be child labours and often suffer from health problems. As they are neglected by their parents, they lack proper food, education, care and exposed to sexual abuse etc.
Evening Study Centres
This scheme is the first of our initiatives that aims to provide supplementary education to children in rural and slum areas from grade 1 to 8th and up to 12th grade through our Evening Study Centres (ESCs) . The very base of our organisation’s initiative, has so far catered to over15000 children since the year 1995.
Skill Development of Youth
Facilitation on preventing the rural youth from falling in to life risking jobs and enabling them to equip themselves towards high income jobs.
SPPD has been involved in activities to divert the youth who have finished schooling, from falling in to illegal and hazardous jobs. The youngsters and their parents are sensitized on vocational skill studies that offer high income generating jobs. Apart from the guidance we support the youth who wish to join the skill training courses in the sectors like hospitality trade, medical related allied skill trainings etc by bearing their travel expense to training centres and providing nutritious lunch daily.
Almost 95% of our youth both boys and girls who have completed the skill training courses here since 2007 have landed in very good jobs in high paying hotel chains, restaurants and hospitals in the cities like Bangalore, Chennai, Ooty etc. So far around 550 youth have secured job placements. This intervention has been stransforming the socio- economic conditions of the families of these youth.
The children some how manage to complete the high school and higher secondary finals such as 10th and 12th grades. These youth badly lack in educational standards and also there is absence any guidance about the careers. SPPD strives hard to remove the mindset of both parents and children that consider the high income providing technical jobs as low in social esteem. Similarly, the youngsters who complete their 10th 12th grades successfully in the villages here, after schooling tend to remain idle. Both these sections, the boys in particular are forced in to illegal sand mining and other life risking and distress migration jobs due to severe lack of employable skills.
