Bengaluru: Government school students too aim big, but they are often at a disadvantage as they don't have access to the quality education like their private school counterparts. To provide equal opportunities to government school students, the Mantra4Change, a Bengaluru-based NGO, is working to enable under-resourced schools to deliver quality education to every child.
The NGO works on the concept of Whole School Transformation and Cluster Transformation where low-fee schools and government-run schools are targeted. Mantra4Change, founded in 2013 by Khushboo Awasthi and Santosh More, aims to create a better world with equal opportunities for all with quality and equity in education.
Mr Santosh More told Deccan Chronicle, said, "We hold ourselves accountable to the vision of making quality education available to all children, no matter what socio-economic backgrounds they come from. By 2020, we aim to reach 500 schools, 1,50,000 students and 5,000 teachers directly through our programmes. Students in private schools gain from technology-based learning, but government school students don't have access to such technology."
Mantra4Change works to provide government schoolchildren with a comprehensive, holistic and qualitative education. "The organisation has partnered with schools serving children from underprivileged sections to achieve capacity building of school staff (administrative, teaching and non-teaching) and improved learning outcomes for students. Currently, Mantra works with 100 schools in Bengaluru across three different educational blocks through its Cluster Transformation and School Transformation programmes.
Following a holistic approach to improve schools forms the organization's theory of change," he said.
"Schools catering to children from underserved communities including government-run schools face a severe lack of resources and inadequate support. As a result, they struggle to provide quality education to their students. This is what we are trying to work towards at Mantra4Change. We design our programmes to build the capacity of existing stakeholders in the system, like teachers, school leaders, Cluster Resource Persons (CRPs) and offer sustainability of change efforts even after we exit," said Khushboo Awasthi, another founder member of Mantra4Change.
Mantra also directly works in Andhra Pradesh. Its intervention aims to empower School Leadership (Principals) to drive their school improvement. In 2017, Mantra began an incubation programme, EduMentum, in partnership with Advaith Foundation to support and collaborate with early-stage non-profits working towards systemic education transformation. Seventeen organisations from across the country are a part of this programme. Since 2018, Mantra is also supporting the Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights in an ongoing assessment-led improvement of schools in the state.
