On 14 June, Shine hosted a visit from Pratham at our Zonnebloem centre. The
team of eight highly skilled men and women were brought to South Africa by the
Douglas Murray Trust, Shine’s largest funder. The Douglas Murray Trust has
recently launched their Reading Campaign aimed at connecting like-minded
NGO’S/NPO’s to tackle the issues around literacy by sharing best practice.
Pratham is the largest non-governmental organisation working to provide
quality education to the underprivileged children of India. Pratham was established
in 1994 to provide pre-school education to children in the slums of Mumbai
city. Since then, the organisation has grown both in scope and geographical
coverage, reaching millions of children in both rural and urban areas through a
range of interventions.
All their programmes are designed to
ensure that enrolment in schools
increases, learning in schools and communities increases and that the education
net reaches children who are unable to attend school. Models are replicated and
scaled up to serve large numbers of children to achieve a large scale impact At
its peak in 2008/9, Pratham's ‘Read India’ programme reached 450,000-500,000
children in 43 cities and 33 million children in 305,000 villages. Read more on www.pratham.org
We spent the morning sharing the Shine programme with the delegation: the team observed a literacy session, including a quick impromtu story time with one of the books they very kindly donated to us.We shared an informal coffee and muffin break before Maurita and Bea gave a presentation on the structure of the organisation. We were delighted that one of our grandparents were able to join us for the morning, as well as our two principals from Zonnebloem. It was interesting to note that despite the many differences between the two countries, there are a lot of similar issues. It was very rewarding to have their input, and we look forward to continuing our relationship with them, as we believe we have so much to learn from the Pratham team in relation to both growth and sustainability.
