SSK is a programme for empowering rural women and adolescent girls through education. Its strategies and programmes are women-centred and focus on adult literacy and women's education . This is critical in a context where women's literacy rates are as low as 20% in SC and ST areas.

Some of the highlights of the programme include an innovative ethnographic research on literacy-numeracy practices, developing and testing various packages and modules of thematic literacy and Continuing Education, and linking issues of health, gender, violence, caste, right to work, etc, with the educational work.

 Today 'adult education' is used interchangeably with 'vocational training' or 'functional literacy', and there are very few initiatives that integrate women's empowerment and social transformation within their educational work. Nirantar's SSK programme foregrounds 'literacy for empowerment', by linking women's lived realities to its educational initiatives - literacy centres, camps and material for enabling and sustaining literacy. This is supplemented by strategies like organising events that bring women together.