Educating millions of children in the slums of India
When Bina Lashkari was studying to become a social worker, she did an internship at a municipal school in Mumbai’s slums. Her task included understanding the children’s low levels of attendance. The reasons were many: they lived far away from the school, stayed at home to care for younger siblings, or worked to contribute to the family income. Bina decided that these children deserved a good education, despite the difficult conditions.
Bina founded Door Step School 30 years ago. She converted buses to classrooms and drove them to the places where the children worked so that those unable to come to school also learnt to read and write. India has changed over the years, and so has Door Step School. As more children go to school, the focus shifted to making sure that children don’t drop out, and actually learn something. Door Step School does this by running pre-schools, offering remedial teaching, IT and science labs, and mobile libraries.
Throughout the years, Social Initiative has worked to improve the organisation’s impact measurement, enabled the testing of new, innovative programmes, and expanded the high impact programmes to new slums in Mumbai. In recent years, the focus has been on helping Door Step School assess and launch teaching in the English language.
Together with one of our corporate partners, Social Initiative supports Door Step School to scale up their operations by recruiting key employees and increasing efficiency through digitization.
