PRAJAYATNA

Prajayatna is a not for profit, development initiative, working to improve the public education system in India. Since the year 2000, Prajayatna has been working with different stakeholders, especially communities and local government bodies, towards the holistic development of schools and preschools. Our work which can be broadly categorized under the areas of Educational Governance, Capability Based Learning and Early Child Care & Education, is presently operational in the States of Karnataka,Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh.  Educational Governance: In improving how schools are managed or governed, Prajayatna works with communities, elected representatives and the bureaucracy. The organization has developed processes to ensure community participation and to sustain community involvement through the development of constitutional structures that represent people.  Capability Based Learning (Kalikayatna): The Kalikayatna learning approach that is child centred and focused on understanding how children learn and concentrates on developing capabilities in children and thereby bring out the innate abilities inherent in every child and make them self-learners. The key features of the approach are: integrated curriculum, continuous and comprehensive evaluation, teacher’s empowerment, mixed age groups / classes.  Early Child Care & Education(ECCE): The present approach of ECCE has been derived from the extensive work of the organisation in this field for the past several years. Initially,Prajayatna had worked with communities to set up pre-schools in areas where there was much need for such facilities. Subsequently, the experience has been used to work with the Department of Women and Child to address concerns of ECCE in a sustainable manner by strengthening the government run preschools which are the ICDS Centres.