NIRANTAR - a centre for gender and education

About Sahajani Shiksha Kendra

Nirantar’s programme Sahajani Shiksha Kendra, has been working in Mehroni block of Lalitpur district in Uttar Pradesh since April 2002, with the mandate of empowering women and adolescent girls through literacy and education. The programme has developed organically over the past four years.

The first year was spent understanding the context and area, selecting the villages, identifying and training the facilitators, determining the programme strategy and initiating the village-level centres.

The second year saw greater clarity in the programmes’ vision and strategies, and the increasing involvement of women at the grassroots level. Several activities – running residential literacy camps, consolidating the village-level centres, addressing local development problems, producing a broadsheet with the learners – were initiated.
From the third year onwards, the programme has both expanded and become more cohesive.

Our focus has been on consolidating and trying out innovations within our literacy and education work; developing capacities of the team at the level of concepts and skills in a number of different areas; and creating a range of materials locally. One of the positive achievements of the programme has been that a large group of women are now committed to the programme's vision.