Mantra4change sees itself as a catalyst for transforming public education in India, by creating empowered education leaders across the country. In a country with a 42% high-school dropout rate and poor performance indicators at the primary school level, the organisation wants to enable education leaders to drive sustainable improvements in 1.5 lakh public schools by 2025.
Mantra4change’s flagship programme for fulfilling this mission is STEP – School Transformation and Empowerment Programme. It involves collaborating with a variety of stakeholders – teachers, school heads, academic leaders – and working closely with schools in order to improve the quality of education provided to children. So far, the organisation has introduced STEP in over 3,000 schools, collaborating with more than 6,000 teachers and 700 school leaders.
Apart from working directly with schools, Mantra4change also works with government agencies like state-level Departments of Education and District Institutes of Education and Training to develop their leadership capacity and co-create programmes for the education system. At least 2 lakh schools have benefited through these collaborations.
The project supported by MFE:
Organisation building support – Rural and Tribal Education Collective, EduMentum
This five-year project aims to build and strengthen another of Mantra4change’s flagship programmes – EduMentum. The programme involves bringing together various promising organisations working in education, and training and nurturing them to help them become sustainable and have a stronger positive impact on the education system.
More specifically, this project focuses on creating a collective of nine non-profit organisations working for the betterment education in remote rural and tribal areas, and help them with capacity building through trainings in hiring, fundraising and organisational growth. Mantra4change will invite organisations that are at least three years old, with a minimum annual budget of Rs 20 lakh, to apply for a position in this collective. Selected organisations will be inducted in batches and be provided with sub-grants for two years each.
Mantra4change has committed to ensuring that all organisations inducted in the collective achieve 100% improvement in their programme design goals and clear monitoring metrics, as well as 100% increase in the scale of their outreach to beneficiaries. It wants the members of the collective to achieve 70% of their organisation building goals during the project period, which includes not only hiring and retaining staff at the top positions, but also improving their skills in designing a theory of change, a monitoring-and-evaluation model, and strategies.
It also aims to train the organisations to increase their funds by 75%, and enable them to raise funds on their own at the end of two years, so that they are better equipped to serve local schools and communities.