Neha Singh is an active NASSCOM Foundation MyKartavya volunteer under its ‘Skills for Change’ program where the Foundation helps other NGOs in need by providing the right volunteers to help them.
One such NGO, Savera works towards the betterment of women and children. As part of one of their initiatives, they rescue children working as child labor, rehabilitate them and encourage them to study.
They discovered that in a particular batch of rescued children, the school drop out rate had become alarmingly high within a short duration of time.
Neha stepped in as a volunteer to help study the ground level situation and come up with a strategy to retain these students.
When she started working on the project, only 40 out of the 200 rescued students were attending school on a regular basis.
She took a systematic approach to the problem by first studying the real cause of drop-outs. She started by collecting the attendance data of not just the students but teachers too. Post this, she sampled out the data and interviewed some of the students and found that there was a huge mismatch between the level of studies imparted to them and their current level of understanding.
She found that students were admitted in the schools on the basis of their age and not their earlier educational level. She helped correct this mismatch and today, from the 200 rescued children, over 180 are attending the school on a regular basis.
Neha brought the problem-solving skills she uses on a regular basis as an IT professional, to help children get back into school. She has gone a step ahead and proposed a new age, adaptive learning methodology to the school so that the students may learn at their own pace.
Once a volunteer, always a volunteer, Neha continues to do good, currently helping Bhumi with project coordination.
