The Great Generation

Palam Vihar November 2006

Background

At the end of last year, a small group of volunteers learnt about the issues facing the local community in Palam Vihar, an hours drive South of Delhi on the border of Haryara in India.

India has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the world, with roughly one third of the world’s non-literate population residing in India. And as our volunteers discovered in Palam Vihar, one of the main barriers to education for poor children in India is that their families need them to skip school to work and earn money for the family, or to stay at home and look after their younger siblings so that their parents can work.

Volunteers visited Palam Vihar, a slum community where there are very few state schools providing access to education for these poor and marginalised communities. It is in Palam Vihar and the surrounding communities, that our Expert Partner, Literacy India works. Literacy India has been established for over 9 years and is involved in a number of projects in and around Palam Vihar, Gurgaon, including running a school of 300 students, a theatre project for students, a mother’s literacy project, a women’s enterprise project, and running a health centre, just to name a few!!! The aim of our project was to complement the community development work, which Literacy India is doing to combat illiteracy and poverty in Palam Vihar.

The Project

The main volunteer task for this project was to set up a football club for the young people to take part in after school. It was a huge hit and the volunteers were amazed that many of the children had never kicked a football around in their life before. Volunteers also ran a wide range of other activities, which included teaching the children English, conducting photography classes with the children, taking photos and filming footage for the Literacy India website, improving the website and other organisational development activities.

The Legacy

As part of the programme to enable each group to remain connected with communities through small insfrastructure grants, our volunteers have already invested in the football equipment needed to get the football club up and running in Palam Vihar. Back home, volunteers are in the process of deciding which enterprise opportunities to support in Palam Vihar to issue the first micro-loan for this community.