SAJAG

Supported by: Wipro

About SAJAG

SAJAG aims to provide foundational literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional skills to primary-grade students in Kalyan. Kalyan is a peripheral city, two hours away from Mumbai by rail. It has a population of 1.2 million, with a majority of such households falling in the low-income category. The latter households find it difficult to access education, ensuring their social, political, and economic marginalization. At SAJAG, we are committed to consistent and sustainable efforts to enable marginalized children to access education.

Program updates

This year, our focus was to make good the learning losses that took place on account of COVID-19. Being out of school for two years has not only affected the academic skills of the children but also their social and emotional skills. Our projects had to be re-strategized and prioritized to deal with the above challenges. We had to close some of the older projects at the community level like the adult literacy project, and remedial project. Instead, we were required to conceive and work on newer projects to support the schools we have been closely working with in the past.

We continued with the Complementary Learning Centre (CLC), as an after-school project for primary grades and focused on our work with schools and libraries. We started one new CLC and started working with five schools. This included four government schools and one low-cost private school. The learnings from CLC were utilized to support the school in helping students cover lost grounds, academically speaking, as well as recultivate their social and emotional skills.

This year our team grew, and Wipro’s capacity-building programme supported our team building. SAJAG’s co-founder Sajitha is a Wipro Fellow. The SAJAG team also participated in the capacity-building programs organized by Wipro. Our project coordinator attended the Khelghar and Digantar workshop whose learnings are reflected in our work this year. Our team also visited Khelghar which not only helped in team building but also served as a place for reflection. Exposure to other organizations, meeting new people working in similar fields, and sharing and listening, all together, helped in identifying the relevance of our work in the larger context. It also added to our morale and confidence.