Education for Change
Eklavya is a movement that aims to improve access to quality education and opportunities and enable grassroots leadership among rural and marginalized youth. We do it by providing mentorship, training, and guidance to first-generation learners from rural and marginalized communities to help them get admission into premier Higher Education Institutes (HEI) and development fellowships.
In the last 5 years our intervention helped 750+ students to get into premier institutes of higher education and prestigious fellowships (Example TISS, APU, IITs, Central Universities, ISDM, Gandhi Fellowship, Teach for India Fellowship, Goonj Fellowship, SBI YFI Fellowship etc). Using higher education as a tool we aim to enable leadership from grassroots.
Why higher education?
Higher education remains by and large inaccessible to India’s underserved communities – Dalits and Adivasis and other marginalized groups . Data from the NSSO 2014, indicates that enrolment in college education for Dalits is 20.8% and for Adivasis, is 15.7 %. For dominant castes it is 39.5%. Their presence is even bleaker in premier universities as out of 10 top universities in India students from dalit and tribal groups are underrepresented in 7 universities (recent survey of Department of Higher Education).
Since Higher education is a tool for social transformation and plays an important role in enhancing the knowledge and skills of people, and is a primary engine of upward mobility. But generations of dalit, adivasi, nomadic tribes and other marginalized communities remained deprived of higher education and its benefits. It resulted in a lack of their representation in influencing leadership positions in different spectrums.
EKLAVYA INDIA FOUNDATION 