Programmes
Education & Child Care
Households here move for work, and a child's schooling breaks with every move — or ends altogether, because the family needs another wage. Two programmes run against that: learning-assistance classes that restart a child's education wherever it stopped, and a course that asks adolescent boys to think again about what they owe the girls and women around them.
Thematic area
Education, Equality & Empowerment
શિક્ષણ, સમાનતા અને સશક્તિકરણ
The strategic goal it works towards
To strengthen educational opportunities for children and young people from underserved communities, integrate gender equality into adolescent education, and enhance literacy and life skills through capacity-building and learning programmes that advance women’s empowerment.
Read the whole frameworkThis programme covers
- Center for Learning Assistance — supplementary classes in ten villages
- Gender Education — the Foundation and Action for Equality course for boys
- Child rights awareness in villages and schools
- Mainstreaming children who have left school for work
- Non-book activities on health, environment and child rights
- Referral for children in need of care and protection
The problem
Migration is the mechanism. Families follow work, children move with them, and each move costs a term. To help support the household, children go out to earn instead, and what started as a gap becomes a permanent exit — many of the children who reach our classes have had no schooling worth the name. Parents working long days have little time to push back, and the resources that might compensate — a device, a connection, a tutor — are not there. Underneath sits a second problem the same age group carries: norms that treat a girl's time, movement and education as negotiable in a way a boy's is not, and that treat violence against women as ordinary.
What we do
Start where the child stopped
A learning assistant checks what a child actually knows and picks the thread up there, whatever the school register says. Classes support the school day rather than replacing it — the child's own subject work, in a group small enough that someone notices when a child goes quiet.
Teach the child, not only the syllabus
Part of the point of a centre is that a child has an adult with time. Interests and talent get attention, occasions get marked, and a child being prepared to leave school for work has somebody to talk to about it. Attendance is tracked because absence is the first signal.
Work with the boys who become men
Fifteen weekly sessions of two hours with boys aged 13 to 17 — gender, rights, adolescence, sexuality, health, violence and masculinity — run with Equal Community Foundation's course material and facilitators drawn from the same villages.
In school, not in labour
The objective the trust has stated since the 1990s is blunt: every child of school-going age in school rather than at work. Non-book activities on health, environment and child rights are the way in, because children who have stopped attending will come for an activity before they come for a lesson.
Education and child care has been part of Hariraj Charitable Trust since it was founded in 1993, when the trust’s first activities were primary education and a reproductive and child health programme. Children in these villages still meet discrimination and violence in forms that a national statute has not reached, and the practical response has not changed much either: be present in the village, be there over years rather than terms, and work with the child and the household at the same time.
Center for Learning Assistance
Communities here migrate frequently for their livelihoods, and their children’s education is what gives way. Children also go to work early to support the family, which results in patchy learning or none at all. The Center for Learning Assistance exists to bring those children back — the key stakeholders are the learning assistants, the parents and the children’s own school teachers, and it is between them that a child’s particular need gets identified.
Why the centres are needed, in the terms the programme itself uses: parents have little time; children miss school because they are needed at work; resources and technology are scarce, which became acute when schooling moved online; and families on continuous migration leave children with no stable school at all. Getting such a child back into the mainstream takes more than lessons — it takes attention to the interpersonal and emotional gaps the disruption left.
How a class works
- Assistance with the child’s own class and subject work, rather than a parallel syllabus
- Time with a learning assistant that any child at the centre can use — not only for study, but to talk
- Encouragement where a child has a particular interest or talent, and support where a child is being prepared to leave school for work
- Project work and activities built around books, stories, games and shared tasks
- Special occasions marked together
- Responsibility taken by the centre for participation and for turning up to sessions on time
Gender Education
Why educate boys about equality? Violence against women remains a major public health and women’s health threat, and it worsens in emergencies. Gender inequality, and norms that make violence against women acceptable, are its root cause. Any serious work on women’s empowerment therefore has to engage men and boys meaningfully — which means grooming the men of the future while they are still boys today. As the course puts it: not all men are part of the problem, but all of them can be part of the solution.
The programme runs as the Foundation and Action for Equality course: fifteen modules, one two-hour session a week, with boys aged 13 to 17. The modules cover expectations and human rights, gender and gender equality, adolescent change, sex and sexuality, sexuality and health, and violence and masculinity. Facilitators run the sessions; school students and other young people in the village take part. Several module sessions have been filmed and published in Gujarati on the trust’s YouTube channel, which is the closest thing to a public record of what is actually said in the room.
Why this partnership. Equal Community Foundation works on educating boys and provides the educational support and course material for the programme. Hariraj has the local reach and the experience of working with children in these villages. Each side supplies what the other lacks.
What the programme is aiming at
- Rural areas specifically, where low levels of education, harmful alcohol use and child maltreatment make violence against girls and women more likely
- Emotional support for boys at a formative age, and the behaviour, mindset and understanding that follow from it
- A society that is gender-equitable rather than male-dominant
- Surfacing and resolving the discriminations people in these villages actually face
- Change that travels outward — from the individual to the family, then to groups, then to the village
Child rights and CHILDLINE 1098
1098 is a free helpline any child in need of aid or assistance can call. Hariraj worked with CHILDLINE Amreli 1098 on awareness activities in its intervention areas, so that children would know their rights and feel able to speak up if they were in trouble or needed care and protection. That collaboration belongs to the years before 2023, when CHILDLINE services across India were brought under district administrations through the Mission Vatsalya scheme; the helpline is no longer run through NGO partners. The number still works, and it is still free.
Child Development Centre — a past programme
The Child Development Centre was a village-level initiative run with CottonConnect to build child-friendly villages, aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Its purpose was to keep children out of labour in cotton farming and in ginning units, to support the education and well-being of children — particularly the children of migrant parents — and to give them a safe place to learn and play. In practice that meant recreation and sport, moral and value-based learning, academic support and mainstreaming for children who had dropped out, art and craft, nutritious meals and health check-ups.
The centre is no longer running. Much of what it was built to do now sits inside the learning assistance programme.
Where we work
Rural villages in Amreli district, the base the classes have always run from. The trust as a whole now works in four districts of Gujarat — Amreli, Rajkot, Vadodara and Narmada — but which of the newer districts this programme has reached is not something we hold a location list for, so it is not claimed here.
- 10
- Learning assistance locations
- 10
- Gender education locations
By the numbers
- 250
- Children in Center for Learning Assistance classesAcross ten rural locations; figure as published on Hariraj's previous programme page in 2023
- 465
- Boys who completed the Foundation and Action for Equality courseCumulative across ten locations; figure as published on Hariraj's previous programme page in 2023
- 15
- Weekly sessions in the equality courseOne module per session, two hours a week, with boys aged 13 to 17
- 5,000+
- Children reached since 1993, organisation-wideFoundation figure published on Hariraj's previous website; year and method not stated
What we do not yet measure
Every figure on this page counts children enrolled, not anything that changed for them. We do not yet publish learning gains from the assistance classes, how many of those children were still in school a year later, or any before-and-after measure of the boys who finish the equality course — and those are the numbers that would tell you whether the work does what it claims. What we can honestly report is where the classes are, how many children come, and how regularly they come. Building the rest is current work, and until it exists we would rather leave this section thin than dress enrolment up as impact.
Partners
- Equal Community Foundation
- CottonConnect
- CHILDLINE 1098
