Addressing learning poverty, more specifically improving the foundational literacy numeracy (FLN) skill among the vast number of children in rural remote and in underprivileged section of urban and semi urban areas, is a critical task for the future of the nation. The historical gap here has deepened further due to the school closures caused due to the pandemic. To address this challenge, Contact Base has taken the initiative to change the education landscape of rural India with the strategy of developing grass-root edu-preneurs. With this objective in mind, Contact Base started disseminating quality education to rural children from the art and craft clusters of West Bengal with the support of few organisations. The curriculum focuses on Foundational Numeracy and Literacy, which adopts playful methods to teach under-privileged rural children. To create grass-root edu-preneurs, we have identified two people from each village, who serve as teaching volunteers. These teaching volunteers are trained in the curriculum and methodology following a hybrid mode, so that they can in turn become equipped to disseminate quality education to rural children and improve their learning credentials.
Students from kindergarten to Class 5 are taught English and Mathematics following playful methods and local props. In English, the students learn the usage of vowels and meaning of different words. Innovative methodologies like usage of songs, playful and interactive methods are used to teach English grammar. In Maths, students are taught numbers and units of digits in terms of Hundreds, Tens and Ones, simple calculations like addition, subtraction and multiplication. Apart from these students also engage in activities like singing, making alphabets from clay doughs, using pebbles to write digits, rhymes, use of colours etc.
The initiative has been taken up in 13 art and craft villages across West Bengal namely (https://www.youtube.com/
To give further impetus to this initiative, from June 2024 the CSR department of Exide Industries started supporting quality education to rural learners in four villages namely Bhagwanpur, Chandipur, Bannabagram and Warishpur.
Contact Base is one of the NGO empanelled with the Bengal Chamber Foundation Portal and also participated in the Fast-Pitching Session organized by the CSR committee of The Bengal Chamber of Commerce.
