Incentivizing Students to Attend School

I will be conducting my practice experience from June 3 to July 24. My objective will be to aid the Pardada Pardadi Educational Society by designing a new school menu and volunteering during their health camp. The health camp will take place from June 10-20 for village community health outreach and wellness checks. Furthermore, if time permits I will be assisting Sam (founder of the organization) with designing a micro-financing project. I chose this specific school because this institution seeks to reach out to girls in the community, who would otherwise be committed to labor instead of learning, by providing education.

Even though I come from a low-income community, I have always been blessed enough to attend school. Therefore with this in mind, I find it unacceptable when girls are forced to stay home to take care of siblings or do housework instead of attending school because of their unfortunate status below the poverty line. Through the GPP 115 class that I took last semester, I learned about eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that the United Nations agreed to achieve by the year 2015. Goal number two of achieving universal primary education strikes me the most since I strongly believe that every individual should have the right to get adequate education. Pardada Pardadi’s goal is to teach girls to become self-supporting by providing them with an education that will meet high school qualification and marketable skills in textile work, while providing incentives through savings. Thus, Professor Ananya’s class inspired me to go abroad to fight against poverty by increasing education as well as gender empowerment.

One of Pardada Pardadi’s obstacles was to convince parents to send their girls to this organization. As I was searching for other successful models, Pardada Pardadi Educational Society’s model seems incomparable to the others. The organization that I will be volunteering for provides students with uniforms, books, shoes, three meals a day, and bicycles (or buses for those who live too far to bike), and ten rupees a day. Even though ten rupees is less than twenty-five cents, ten rupees is worth a lot in India. Each day a girl attends school, the organization deposits ten rupees into her bank account that she can access after she graduates twelfth grade. Thus, she will earn up to 30,000 rupees ($600 equivalent) by the time she graduates from the organization. The girls are counseled by mentors of Pardada Pardadi to use the money wisely such as starting a business or for family emergencies. Lastly, one of the most powerful tools for convincing parents to send their students is the promise of a guaranteed job at the organization. This illustrates that parents will do just about everything for their children to have a guaranteed future. Therefore, I am providing those who are also having trouble to get children to school the link of the organization that I will be volunteering for this summer to serve as a reference you guys can learn about of what a successful model of an institution should be.

Source: http://www.education4change.org/job-guarantees.html

*look under “Our Model”