By Business India Editorial

In 2015, the United Nations’ member states adopted a programme: ‘Ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education to promote life-long learning opportunities for all’ as the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) for Quality Education. Recently, the UN has also launched a rallying call to gather momentum on the SDGs, calling this the decade for action. 

Covid-19, however, has upended a lot of the progress that was made over years of work on educational inclusion and literacy. The two years plus of intermittent lockdowns have forced schools to transform to online learning, but only a few had resources to make their children attend classes from home. Additionally, the pandemic impacted job and livelihood, with more children being pulled out of schools. But, remote learning remains out of reach for at least 500 million students globally. 

Learning through activity: The Vodafone India Foundation has aligned its CSR initiatives with the UN agenda for Quality Education through its ‘Connected Learning’ initiatives. Be it through educating the educators, building model schools for students, enabling inclusive and holistic learning or bolstering merit with financial means, the interventions focus on technology, as well as people. 

Given the foundational role played by teachers in shaping future generations, Jigyasa – Vodafone Foundation’s flagship programme in education – focuses on alleviating some of the teachers’ most pressing concerns. The programme connects with more than 50,000 teachers in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, training them in digital teaching methodology and providing them with curated content resources, in line with the syllabus. This initiative has benefitted about 1.6 million students across the country.

Vodafone Foundation helps fulfil the vision of holistic development for students. Model schools are established in Karnataka, Gujarat, and Maharashtra, in addition to the five states supported by the Jigyasa programme. These schools are provided with the civil infrastructure, library resources and other facilities essential to make the school conducive to learning. 

The Foundation has also deepened its support to teachers. It has developed Gurushala – a knowledge-sharing platform – which equips a growing community of over 200,000 teachers with resources, training and community networking facilities, accessible in both Hindi and English. “I get topic-related videos and share them with the class,” says Sunita Sharma, a teacher from Delhi. “I have also been able to connect and clear children’s doubts using Google Meet and WhatsApp.”

This initiative has become more of a movement, with more teachers joining the active online community. Teachers access and share over 30,000 content pieces that help them modify their teaching material in innovative ways. This is how a school mentor turned things around for Sufiya, a differently-abled, class V student from Haridwar. His learning difficulties and lack of enjoyment in a traditional classroom set-up underwent a sea change when the mentor introduced him to gaming modules. Sufiya’s learning journey suddenly became more exciting and positive.