AID Chennai Plan

Our Strength

AID Chennai has different kinds of people within it.  We have a strong core group of volunteers working in the IT industry and in colleges.  We have a large number of volunteers who help out for a few hours every week.  We have a good fulltime resource team in education and health and field implementation and also a number of volunteers in each village we are working in.  This multi-level volunteer network was what helped us respond quickly to the Tsunami tragedy.  During the Tsunami relief efforts our contact base, number of volunteers and field areas and programmes we have started working on have all multiplied several folds.

Pre-Tsunami, we were growing into a very key resource group in the state in the areas of primary education, middle school education and health.  Post–Tsunami we are involved in many different activities.  But it is important that whatever work we take up, we learn and understand the issues deeply and build our capacity as a resource group in it.

Our Vision

To bring about a significant improvement in the quality of life of the poor and marginalized all over Tamilnadu. In particular to improve the quality of education, health, gainful employment and agricultural practices.  To work on the above issues with a secular and equity oriented perspective.

Our Approach

In each field of our intervention there are two inter-connected issues that we must address. 

1.       Understanding the depth of the problem and effective ways to address the problem in one or two areas – in a way in which the solution developed can be scaled up. 

2.       And a creating mechanism for scaling up the solution.

3 Pronged Strategy

1.       Model Development – Integrated Block Development.  We work directly in a few clusters of 40-50 villages each. On each issue we try out different creative ideas – ours and what we learn from others. By implementing these ideas, we actively learn what works and what does not.  In the Integrated Development Blocks, we work in the 40-50 villages on all the issues – education, health, women’s rights, employment and income generation, agriculture, alternate technologies – and try to bring about a measurable improvement in the village cluster.

2.       Resource Groups for each Intervention – By working directly in the integrated blocks, in schools, in other villages and with other organizations, we develop a resource team that has a deep understanding of the problems and intervention possibilities on one issue. Being a resource team means you can start from scratch and build up an effective program in any given area. It means you will interact with and learn from other groups working in the field, you will develop materials, you will train others and you will look at larger questions of state policy.  You will organize the scaling up of effective interventions.  The resource group will work with Government, NGOs, People’s Movements and other institutions and individuals and will help them develop effective intervention programmes.  We have 3 such resource groups - in primary education, science education and health. Slowly other NGOs, the government, schools and groups like UNICEF are recognizing and using our capacity as a resource group in these areas. Over the next few years we will develop a resource group in Agriculture and Income Generation programmes.

3.       Supporting Other Groups – We work with a number of NGOs and movements and support them in many different ways. We arrange funding, develop and supply materials, provide training, help them build their capacities, develop new programmes and help them reach out more effectively. We also work with larger movements try to build in new dimensions.  We also work jointly with other groups to intervene in state policy.

Areas of Long Term Intervention

 Short/Medium Term Intervention in Tsunami Areas

Six Components in Each Intervention

1.      Program Development and Implementation – AID Direct

a.       Learning and creating new program components

b.       Implementing in AID Integrated Blocks

c.       Implementing in other villages/schools on a test scale

2.      Program Implementation - Resource Group Role

a.       Joint programmes with Government/Institutions

b.       Joint programmes with other NGOs

c.       Joint programmes with local groups like tuition centers, youth groups, women’s groups, etc.

3.      Support Resource Group Role

a.       Developing resource materials and distributing/selling to a larger network – schools, NGOs, Govt,  individuals, etc

b.       Helping groups with training, funds, volunteers and ideas

4.      Reaching out – colleges, companies, media, newsletters, web…

a.       Writing, talking, videos and reaching out to the outside world about our programmes and issues

b.       Sensitizing people on the issues on the ground

c.       Motivating people to join – volunteer and donate

d.       Raising funds for the team’s programmes and activities

5.      Team Building

a.       Getting new volunteers and fulltimers into the program

b.       Developing ways to motivate them and involve them fully

c.       Building capacities and creating a resource group that expands in numbers and scale and dimensions of work.

6.      Policies, Studies and Campaigns

a.       Developing a policy position and working with NGOs and Movements on brief campaigns and public sensitization

b.       Forming or participating in long term coalition(s) of NGOs and movements with a clear and progressive perspective on policies and intervention strategies.

Each intervention team will have to work on all the six areas to ensure a healthy growth of the team and its activities.

Pre-primary and Primary Education

Objectives

1.       Improving the quality of primary education by developing activities and materials, demonstrating what can be done and by training school teachers in activity based learning methods for different subject topics

2.       Remedial classes for children - starting with basic literacy and numeracy skills, but moving on to other subject areas

3.       Enrolment of all children and preventing drop outs

4.       Organizing teacher’s networks and getting teachers to share academic and teaching experiences to improve quality of schools

5.       Creating programs and support networks for working children

6.       Improving school infrastructure and environment and children’s access to resources

Activities

1.      Eureka Kalvi Iyakkam Support Classes: Identification of children with literacy and numeracy problems followed up with focused classes by a trained village volunteer to bring about a measurable improvement in these skills. Some of these centers will be run directly by AID in the integrated blocks areas and we will also work with other organizations and help them do this in many more villages.  This programme also involves creating remedial materials for children, running village libraries and running demo classes in schools.

2.      Eureka Teachers Network and Training Program:  Focused monthly training camps in each cluster where our resource team provides training to school teachers on activity based learning methods in reading, mathematics, science and social science. With the training will come with a set of materials like kits, games, booklets, worksheets, posters, etc – that the teachers can use to immediately implement the ideas in class. Each month the training will review the effectiveness of the previous month’s training and then look at the new set of techniques needed for the next month. Experiences of teachers will be brought out through a newsletter and will be shared with other teachers.

3.      Library and Primary Resource Center in schools:  A library and activity resource kit will be provided to each school with a monthly updating supply of a set of simple story cards.

4.      Primary library, toy and experiment van:  This van will go to each school/village every month and organize a small festival for children to encourage reading and activity based learning. The van will also demonstrate a number of low cost experiments, games and toys that children can make and try out themselves.

5.      Pre-primary Education: To ensure good quality primary education, one needs to start early.  We will run a few pre-primary centers directly in villages and will also train the Govt ICDS staff on activity based learning methods for pre-primary.

6.      Eureka Model Primary Schools: In general we don’t believe in starting and running schools – we believe in working with existing schools and improving their quality.  But in a cluster where a large number of educational interventions in exiting schools are planned, a model school that demonstrates what an activity based school can be like would be very useful.  It will function as a resource center to coordinate activities, an inspiration for teachers and as a training ground for creating education resource persons in the cluster.  For each of our 3 village clusters, we have therefore planned one school. We will also help other organizations with a similar educational perspective start and run such model schools.

7.      Eureka Creative Learning Centers: In each village a learning center will be run to bring out the creativity in children. It will encourage learning by doing experiments and activities, help children do small projects. It will also encourage arts and crafts skills in children.  The center will also organize a number of children’s festivals in the village.

These 7 activities together form a focused intervention in pre-primary and primary education.  As part of the above the team will also develop a large number of education materials which can be used to help many other schools and individuals reach out more effectively. The team will also do education status studies and reports and build up an effective state education resource group and an NGO network.

Middle School Education

Objectives

1.       Improve the quality of Science and Social Science Education

2.       Make science organic to children’s experiences and thinking process and foster scientific and rational thinking in children

3.       Encourage children to think rationally about society, social issues

4.       Bring about a measurable improvement in the understanding of science concepts – both in children and teachers

5.       Improve resources for science & social science in schools

6.       Create teachers networks – for sharing experiences and materials, developing better teaching techniques and enriching their skills.

Activities

1.      Ariviyal Anandam:  ‘Joy of Science’ Clubs in Schools and Villages/Slums. These science clubs will be run by motivated school teachers or directly by our volunteers.  Volunteers will visit every month and demonstrate a model class on a topic – with experiments, flip charts, videos, ppts, etc.  They will get the students to meet weekly and discuss a science topic, try out experiments, prepare demonstrations, and work on projects. Periodically the students come together for an inter-school seminar cum exhibition to present their projects and what they have learnt. 

2.      Science Exhibitions, Festivals, Melas: Science can be a lot of fun. We demonstrate this by organizing science exhibitions, festivals and night sky watching melas in schools and villages.

3.      Eureka Science Van:  One science van is running in Chennai.  Similar vans will now run in all the clusters.  The van is equipped with a small video and multi-media facility, experiment kits, flip charts and books.  The van visits each school once a month and demonstrates experiments and shows educational videos.

4.      Eureka Learning Centers:  Volunteers will run these centers for the youth and students in slums and villages.  The focus is creative activity, spoken English, science demos and youth projects. Linked to the ELCs, a mentor/scholarship program can be started.

5.      Eureka Science Labs and Teacher Training: It is easy to ask teachers to teach science through experiments - it is a lot harder to actually provide them with experiments to do it in class. We have a collection of almost 300 low cost experiments that forms part of our low cost middle school lab kit – with the materials and the manuals for doing the experiments. We will provide this lab kit to schools and train the teachers on one topic each month. Additional teaching materials like videos, slides, flip charts, posters, concept booklets, worksheets, etc will also be added in.  New experiments that can be added to the lab kit and additional teaching aids and reference materials will continuously upgrade the labs.

6.      School Teachers Network: We have started an email network for school teachers. We have about 150 scientists and professors from across the world linked to school teachers by email.  Teachers can send in questions and the resource persons send answers and weekly newsletters on science topics as well. We will now create a postal service for teachers without email. This network will also bring out newsletters with teachers’ experiences and innovations and document the ideas on the web.

7.      Tuition Center Network: There are a large number of voluntary community youth run free tuition centers in villages and slums.  We will network them with monthly training on activity based teaching and also provide them with teaching aids and library kits.

8.      Night Schools: We are starting a number of night schools for children. There are 2 kinds of night schools – free community based tuition centers for children in school and non-formal education centers for children out of school.

9.      Monthly Science Concept and Experiment Booklets:  Each month we create a small cartoon booklet - explaining one topic clearly and visually. We also bring out booklets with experiments and project ideas that the children can easily try out. These booklets will be distributed widely in all areas where we work.

The above 9 interventions form the core of our Middle School Intervention. As part of this we will produce a large number of educational tools that can be disseminated more widely as well.

Health and Women’s Empowerment

Objectives

1.       Measurably improve health status of women and children.

2.       Improve utilization of existing of government health services.

3.       Ensure drinking water in every village

4.       Improve sanitation in every village

5.       Create a team of village health activists who can locally plan for the health needs of their village.

6.       Organize and empower women and sensitize them on gender issues and support women victims of violence

Activities

1.       Nalavazhvu Iyakkam: A community health program with focus on child health and pregnancy care and on building referral linkages with the Primary Health Center network.  Each village has a health volunteer – a woman – who is trained in the basics of preventive and curative health.  In particular, she will be trained on Child Health, Pregnancy Care, Simple Curative Services (with a village level drug depot) and on referral services.  She will maintain a health register, visit house to house and diagnose health problems with children and women and provide preventive and curative services. She will also work closely with the Village Health Nurse, ICDS workers and the PHC and improve the quality and utilization of these government services.

2.       Women’s Health Program: This is a program that focuses on making a measurable improvement in women’s health and in pregnancy care through house to house counseling and through simple curative services.

3.       Adolescent Girl Health Education: This is a series of classes for adolescent girls to build up their understanding about their body, body and emotional changes, gender equality and to build up their self confidence.  In each village/school this program will also organize them into groups – for discussion, mutual support and to work on creative activities and to learn new skills.

4.       Health Van and Health Camps: The van will travel from village to village organizing health education programs and health camps – in particular Gynec, Pediatric and TB camps. The van will work along with the Nalavazhvu Iyakkam to improve the overall quality of the training and back up services. The van will also provide immediate relief (preventive and curative) in epidemic situations.

5.       Health Melas: These are a series of women’s health melas that have fun activities, games, poster exhibitions and discussions around women’s health issues.

6.       Counseling and Support Networks: To work with the most vulnerable sections in the Tsunami areas – women who have lost husbands, children without parents, older people without supporting children – to help create a support network for them in the village, to help them access schemes and to not get cheated.

7.       Health Resource Center: We are developing a large number of materials that can be used more widely by other NGOs and institutions.  The resource center will provide them with these materials and also offer training on how to use them.

8.       Self Help Groups: These women’s micro-credit groups will be started in our cluster villages.  We won’t start a large program in SHGs as there are many organizations already working on this.  Instead we will focus on supportive activities for them in health, education and livelihood.

9.       Sanitation: We will work provision of toilets in all villages – particularly women’s toilet complexes.  We will also work on low cost toilet designs that can generate local employment and at the same time are effective.

10.     Drinking Water: Provision for low cost but good quality drinking water facilities in every village is another area we will work on.

The above ten activities form the core of our health and women’s empowerment work.  Gender equality or health cannot be isolated as a separate program and must be integrated into all our programs.

Income Generation and Vocational Training

Objectives

1.       To train women and unemployed youth in villages on skills that can provide them with employment, or enhance their income or help them start small enterprises.  To provide them with hand-holding support – loans, management and marketing - till they can manage on their own.

2.       To provide product development and quality improvement support for existing village enterprises.

3.       To create a wider marketing network for products made in villages, or by self help groups, NGOs and disabled persons.

Activities

This is a new area of work for us and we enter it with caution. 

1.      Block level enterprise network:  With sustained work on identification of marketable enterprises, organizing training, and helping with creative marketing, it is possible to create a network of successful village enterprises. The program involves market studies, identifying potential entrepreneurs, local capabilities, arranging bank loans, organizing training and marketing and a lot of management and handholding.  The enterprises vary from food and fish processing to electrical repairs and handicrafts. Linked to this enterprise network is a vocational training center which coordinates the training and handholding functions. We will start our work with the Tsunami areas where the initial focus will be on ways to increase the livelihood security of the fisher folk – both through fish related vocations and alternative livelihoods. Over time we will also reach out to other nearby villages and look at the livelihood needs there and income enhancement options there.

2.      Folk Mart:  We must build up a strong marketing network for village products in cities. Folk Mart will look at ways to do this. This will be done independently of the local marketing initiatives that will be part of the block level enterprise network.

Agriculture and Ecology

Objectives

1.       Address the large scale salination of agricultural lands

2.       Make agriculture for the poor peasant remunerative – cutting down input costs and improving yield and better prices.

3.       Help farmers make a better, more informed choice of technologies and practices ensuring:

a.       Sustainable, equitable, sufficient water access for all

b.       Land use that is sustainable, equitable and improves its quality

c.       Better farming practices – seed choices, inputs and pest management

4.       Village institutional structures to make agriculture a more collective operation - sharing technologies, inputs and accessing markets – curbing the control by a few powerful rural households.

Activities

1.       Salination Problem: Alternative cropping strategies, raised bed cultivation and desalination measures.

2.       Eco protection of the coast line: Create green belts linking it up with livelihood opportunities to the local community.

3.       Organic Agriculture: Create a network of farmers who are willing to experiment with organic farming and helping them shift to sustainable and yet remunerative forms of agriculture.

4.       Bio-Fertilizers, Vermi Composting, Waste Management: Set up production and distribution units with training. Set up systems for waste management to collect organic waste for composting.

5.       Soil and Water Testing Unit: To test soil from various farms and to inform farmers on how best to improve the quality and what combination of natural and chemical fertilizers to use.

6.       Water Management:  Participatory technology and community institutions to protect existing water sources and to enhance them along with creating better water harvesting structures.

7.       Wasteland Development: New technologies with ensuring equity and providing jobs to the poorest sections.

Equitec Technology Interventions

Objectives

1.       Expand use of alternate technologies that help the weaker sections.

2.       Provide opportunity to innovate and modify existing technologies so that it can reach out to the poorer sections.

3.       Build institutional systems that help the poor access to more advanced technologies.

4.       Provide an opportunity to involve a large number of people the creative space to invent, design and develop technologies that they find useful or interesting.