Out of 12 million, more than 6 million children are out of school in Sindh province and about 50% of children leave schools before completing primary education. Concrete efforts are required to bring positive change in this situation. PVDP with little efforts are contributing to the larger objectives to educate children and striving for increasing girl’s enrollment in schools. Thus, PVDP is focusing on the children belonging to most poor and marginalized communities living in the remote areas of District Tharparkar.
PVDP’s approach is to support community-based initiatives, whereby local people are engaged in running and participating in their own formal and informal education programs. These come in many shapes and sizes, including pre-school classes’ trainings for teachers in remote villages. Generally, they are more likely to be in informal settings than a school classroom, and are more likely to involve those typically excluded from formal education opportunities, like women, girls and pre-school children.
Classes typically involve social and health topics too. Woven into each informal education program is a range of other topics – gender awareness around girl’s education, health and hygiene awareness, and social issues such as such as human rights and gender inequality.
More than 600 primary schools age girls and boys belonging to poor and marginalized communities of Tharparkar are supported by PVDP through Kinder Mission Work Germany. The management of schools by School Management Committee comprised of the people, children and elders of villages. Different teacher trainings were conducted to teach them innovative methods of teaching comprising of qualities of good teacher, Techniques of teaching different subjects; Science, Math and English. Use of local or low cost material for teaching, learning through games.
PVDP started adult Literacy Centre for women in different village of District Tharparkar Sindh. More than 1500 women received education; learning to read, write and do basic calculation. It was helpful for women to keep account of their household and expenses where men fail to do so.