Community Participation and Outreach
EDC and its partners believe that a community’s participation in its school activities is a critical part of school development and for creating sustainability in education programs. EDC’s Community Participation Program aims at mobilizing the community to be involved in the IRI, GTL and related activities, which will lead to greater community involvement in, and even management of, the school’s development.
Community participation in school programs can accomplish several things, including:
- Providing a check on the dropout rate, attendance rate and quality of education
- Increasing attendance of teachers as they are monitored by the community
- Increasing ownership of processes by community-based organizations
- Increasing use of local knowledge and resources
- Increasing participation of different sects of people in the school development process
dot-EDU T4 activities for developing community participation include:
- Identification and capacity building of existing community-level structures
- Collaboration with partner NGOs and government organizations
- Activation of village-level school-based committees
- Promoting community enrollment drives and improving attendance and quality
- Advocacy for outreach and girls education
- Evaluation and documentation of these activities
EDC has also worked to develop a coherent strategy that trains Shiksha Sahayogis (community leaders) to work with communities around the project schools to support the schools in the development of quality education. The strategy assists local village education committees (VECs) and school development and monitoring committees (SDMCs) to develop plans that include action items that support the use of technology and other tools for the improvement of education.
EDC has developed a community participation handbook titled ‘Improving Community Participation for Quality Teaching and Learning’ to train the Shiksha Sahayogis. It is available in English, Hindi and Kannada. The comprehensive manual examines the role of communities in improving teaching quality by describing the community-school participatory planning process and defining the steps by which communities can initiate this process for their local schools.