Business Need

Our client is a Not-for-Profit organization working in the areas of rural literacy. They have made a significant change at the grass-root level by adopting many villages and working directly with the affected.

Their continuous work with the villagers had seen primary education enrollment rise by about 28% and the dropout rate reduced to almost zero.

COVID -19 brought a screeching halt to their endeavor and schools were closed indefinitely to keep everyone safe. In the absence of access to smartphones and computers, kids’ education in many villages practically came to an end.

KS Solution

Having understood the gravity of the situation and its long-lasting impact on kids’ education, the KS team rewrote various lessons into story scripts that could be performed using storytelling, puppetry, wall art, or street theatre. Our program rollout teams partnered with various Painters, Storytellers, Graffiti artists, Puppeteers, and Theatre groups. These artists were briefed on the concept, substance, and context of those skits. Each artist was provided complete freedom to adapt those stories as per their respective art form.

Graffiti artists painted the house walls of the village depicting various stories from the curriculum. Each day a storyteller would sit in front of a story graffiti wall and tell that story in words to kids, while the same story being shown in puppetry in the backdrop of the graffiti and finally theatre group reinforced the same lesson in their skit. All these performances were done in small groups with about 5-6 kids in each group. Social distancing and COVID protocols were strictly followed while imparting education in the new normal. Sign Language Experts and Mime Artists were engaged to effectively impart these lessons to differently-abled children.

Benefits

Education through multiple art forms has shown better reinforcement and retention.

Students fared exceedingly well in their annual exams.

After success in one village, this model was scaled to 30 other villages impacting a total of about 2200 kids.