Volunteer

The Power of Paper

You may be wondering what can a sheet or even a few sheets of paper really accomplish. Quite a lot actually.

Sikshana‘s charter was to improve the performance of public schools in Karnataka, India. Mr. E.S. Ramamurthy, the founder of Sikshana, has always been an ardent advocate of helping public schools improve themselves. It is during a trip to one of his schools he came upon an interesting problem.

There was a public school in Karnataka,adopted by Sikshana for improvement, where the test scores of students were abysmally low. Sikshana conducted an analysis of the problem including conducting exams where students provided answers verbally. The results of that exam were remarkable. Students who were failing their written tests were scoring really high scores. Initially it puzzled both the teachers of the school and the staff of Sikshana.

After some detailed investigation, the reason for the discrepancy was clear. The students were from economically challenged backgrounds and they had no access to writing paper outside of school. This meant that their writing speeds were really low and they were unable to complete the tests in time, leaving them with low scores.

As they say the biggest problems often have the simplest solutions. Sikshana provided each student of the school with a few stacks of paper costing around $1/student. Students took to this wholeheartedly and used the sheets of paper to hone their writing skills at home.After a few months when the written tests were conducted again, there was a 60% improvement in the test scores of these students.

Quite often when trying to address the problems faced by underprivileged children, most people are fazed by the magnitude of the problem. Sikshana and its success stories teach us that rather than let it freeze us into inaction, use it as inspiration to tackle them at a micro-level and solve them. Quite often than not once the solution is found, the money required is very little.

We at Vibha believe that the key to solving these issues lies in finding and funding innovative projects like Sikshana. That is why we have provided them with over $100,000 in funding over the last two years.

We believe in them. Do you?