Samarthya:Strengthening Community Participation In Education

The relationship between people and governments in democratic societies is defined by a core belief that governments work on behalf of the people they serve, and that those people are able to effectively engage with their government.

Samarthya was started in February 2017 with the belief that the best way to preserve our democracy is to take part in it. From then on, we are in a pursuit of strengthening existing structures which promote public participation in education. 

We, in the context of public education, provide citizens with the information and tools they need to ensure their interests are represented and to hold their leaders to account.  

After working with communities for over 2 years we are now leveraging technologies that will improve information access for citizens and aid in grievance filing and resolution.

Children across government schools in India are not receiving even the basic quality of education that the state mandates for its young citizens, that is the problem Samarthya aims to solve. The linkage of poor/ no education to poverty is well documented.

87% of Indian schools do not comply with the norms & standards laid down in the Right To Education Act (2009) even after 8 years of implementation - as per the government’s own records.

In our view, the biggest bottleneck to improving school quality and learning outcomes has been the lack of accountability at the last mile. The traditional approach to accountability has been top-down - which has been unable to produce the desired results on the ground largely due to the size and scale of India’s school network. In such a scenario, empowering local communities at the school-level towards governance is a sustainable way to infuse the much-needed accountability to bolster the system from the ground-up. We at Samarthya are working on building this capacity in the community.

We are working with the parents of children who study in government schools.  Samarthya empowers communities members to be governance and accountability partners for schools at a local level. We do this by informing and equipping school management committee parent members, in low income communities, with the knowledge and skills required to ensure that children get quality education.

We, in the context of public education, provide citizens with the information and tools they need to ensure their interests are represented and to hold their leaders to account.  We do this by:

- building capacity in citizens to engage effectively with government institutions. This is either done by interactive training sessions or by modeling. 

- supporting citizens in recognizing and building alignment on public education issues they want to solve in their community. We do this by providing contextual support to citizens on the problems they want to solve.

Our approach systematically equips the citizen with the knowledge skills required to engage effectively with the government and access feedback and redressal mechanisms.

After working with communities for over 2 years we are leveraging technology to scale by partnering with Shikshalokam - an open-source digital platform for Education Leadership. 

ShikshaLokam is a manifestation of Societal Platform thinking that proposes a systemic method to resolve complex societal challenges with speed, at scale, sustainably. It offers foundational technology capabilities as public good.