The Piramal Foundation, a leading social change non-profit organization of the country, organised a two-day workshop at Mangaldai from Saturday for consolidation of the works carried out by the change leaders for transforming education in Assam’s aspirational districts.
Piramal Foundation, has been working under the Niti Aayog for implementing the Prime Minister’s vision of transforming education in the ‘aspirational’ districts of Assam including Darrang.
The two-day workshop was organised at Mangaldai for consolidation of the works done by the change leaders, who are also called ‘Gandhi Fellows’ across all the teams of Piramal Foundation in five districts throughout the process of School Ecosystem Immersion(SEI), a pilot to block and district transformation.
“The two-day programme was designed to bring together the teams working in Barpeta, Baksa, Darrang, Dhubri and Goalpara to facilitate sharing of the achievements, challenges, success stories and mode of interventions during the SEI process which included improvement of Students Learning Outcome (SLO), establishment of functional Library, Building As Learning Aids called ‘BALA’ in short form, Functional School Management Committee, Functional Assembly and Community Mobilization to endorse the concept of stakeholder’s ownership in the schools that were adopted by the Gandhi fellows for a span of 20 consecutive days,” the Foundation stated in a press release.
The highlight of the workshop was the presentation of an exhibition where all the groups of the Gandhi Fellows from the respective districts displayed the different innovative techniques they have applied for bringing a transformation in the existing education scenario besides the various challenges they had faced in their work field.
The workshop, participated by all the thirty five Gandhi Fellows of the five districts, district and programme leaders respectively, was inaugurated by Jwahera Begum, District Elementary Education Officer, Darrang in presence of several senior officials of the district education department and Sarba Siksha Abhiyan (SSA), Darrang.
Many other senior officials of the State Education Department including principal of DIET , Darrang Madhab Chandra Sarma also attended the workshop and had a fruitful interaction with the participants.
It may be mentioned that the Piramal Foundation’s Change Leaders or the Gandhi Fellows, who have been working in the schools in five districts of Assam from the last couple of months have successfully been able to transform libraries and print rich walls as a first pilot project across 39 schools, the Foundation claimed.
The Gandhi Fellows have leveraged local community support and school education system officials to raise funds and books that have transformed the schools.
The Piramal Foundation claimed, it has been able to create ownership among the school community stakeholders who have worked during weekend holidays to ensure their schools take forward the change initiatives that Niti Ayog and the Piramal Foundation have initiated in the districts.