Ekal
Organization background

The Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation is an organization that serves to improve the quality of primary education in rural parts of India. Due to a lack of accessible public government schools and pressing agricultural labor needs, village children have very limited schooling options. Ekal pioneered the idea of the one-teacher school (OTC) — Ekal Vidyalayas that use one teacher (often from the same village), who provides primary education to around 30 children in that village. By 2020, Ekal has expanded to 100,000 schools, benefiting around 3 million children.

Project background

Ekal's main project is the operation of OTC's, which aim to provide a functional education to village children in remote areas. With the dual goal of improving the efficiency of these Ekal schools, and also introduce children to technology, in 2017-2018, Ekal started an e-shiksha initiative, where the children in the Ekal schools are taught with computer tablets. Age appropriate lessons are uploaded on the tablets, which are then used for education. The lessons are kept update by periodically uploading the latest versions. The use of the computers also makes the lessons more interactive and interesting, and gives rural children their first introduction to computers.

In 2020, Ekal introduced the Integrated Village Development program. This program constitutes all of Ekal's interventions — a digital literacy program; a health program focused on preventative medicine and a skills training a program focused on women, youth & farmers. The end goal of the program is for villages to be self-sufficient and less reliant on external programmatic funding.

GKF Contributions to Ekal