DAYA CHILD DEVELOPMENT CENTRE
Education is the key to breaking the cycle of poverty! DAYA child development centers are set up in communities to enable holistic care for children. We focus on education, nutrition, health, sanitation, and children’s rights. We work with local volunteers, guided by our central team.
Even though there is free public education for children in India, it can be difficult, for children with learning gaps, to learn. The classrooms are overfilled, teachers are underpaid and overworked and parents have little education if any. It is common for children to fail and have to repeat classes. With a lack of support and progress, it is easy for them to lose motivation and stop going to school altogether.
A developing brain needs proper nutrition. According to our investigations in the communities where we are working, almost half the children are undernourished and almost all of them have a low intake of fruit and protein. Malnutrition can affect the brain permanently.
We are screening the children in the location for learning gaps, health issues, and malnutrition. We are then designing our interventions according to the need. We use DAYA’s bridge education gap curriculum to design a specific learning plan and assignment folder for each individual child with the goal of helping the child to catch up to their age-appropriate class as soon as possible. The centres are run by wonderful local volunteers that are getting a small stipend. They get training from our core team of experienced teachers before starting and then regular guiding sessions where the development of each individual child is discussed. The centre is completely free for all children.
The function of the curriculum and course material
DAYA has for several years been providing classes to help students bridge the learning gaps. The challenges we faced were that the teachers must be able to teach students at multiple levels and that the speed of progress of the students is varied. To maximize our impact, we have found it necessary to develop a curriculum with teaching material specifically designed for catch-up classes and made for students with Odia as their primary language. The goal of the curriculum is that the child should as soon as possible be reintegrated into mainstream school
Our Centers
Khandagiri Child Development Centre
This is our oldest center, where we have been present for more than a decade. In Khandagiri center we run classes in several batches spread out throughout the day, to be able to teach in smaller groups. All the children are from the slums around Khandagiri. The teachers that are developing our curriculum and are guiding all the centres, take classes in Khandagiri centre. This gives them an opportunity to see how the curriculum.
Sundarpur Child Development Centre
Sundarpur center is in a small village close to Bhubaneswar, the capital of Odisha. When screening the children, we found that almost 90% of the children had big learning gaps in most subjects. Only a small fraction of the older children was able to read and write. This is some of the worst results we have seen in any location.
Many of the children are severely malnourished and we found out that most of the children were coming to the center on empty stomach, something that hampered their learning. We are therefore implementing a breakfast intervention from April 2021, providing the children with breakfast before we start our class.
All the people living in Sundarpur are from one of Odisha’s many tribes and many of the children are unable to speak Odia. Our teacher here is local and are speaking the tribal language. She is now doing the important work of teaching the children Odia in addition to literacy and numeracy skills.
The students are now learning in their own language for the first time in their lives. We have a lot of work left ahead of us in Sundarpur, but we are certain that we will see great progress among the children.
Janla Child Development Center
Janla center has 25 children attending regularly. We are teaching in two separate groups to be able to help each child individually. All the children are from slums in Janla, 15 km outside Bhubaneswar.
Badapada
Badapada is a small village in Gajapati District. It is located 267 km from the state capital
Bhubaneswar. We have two centers in Badapada with a total of almost 100 children.
Badapada center 1
Badapada 2
There are lots of children interested in attending our tuition center. As we get additional sponsors we can increase the number of children participating in the program.