Community Day 2015: Wrap-up

Today, one of the biggest challenge in India is illiteracy and it leads to various other complications including steady growth of crime YoY basis.

As far as stats, 29 percent of children drop out before completing five years of primary school, and 43 percent before finishing upper primary school. High school completion is only 42 percent. This lands India among the top five nations for out-of-school children of primary school age, with 1.4 million 6 to 11 year olds not attending school. Without immediate and urgent help, these children cannot effectively progress in the education system, and so improving the quality of learning in schools is the next big challenge.

Our 300+ strong influencer base across the country including MVPs, MSPs, College Students, Faculties, and User Groups Leads decided to take up this challenge with us as part of “Digital Citizenship” program on September 19, 2015 and help support the country to grow.

Many colleges, NGO/NPO and Microsoft Innovations Centers across the country also joined in this mission to spread digital literacy and higher education options among young citizens of India.

Across 22 cities, towns and villages in a day with 190 schools and 11000 children from VII to XII standard, is what we call Community Day 2015.

And, as we promised to ourselves, we certainly created a buzz and excitement among our younger generation about computers and higher education. And, this was the key take-away from this activity.

We handed over a small career tracker to each of these kids. We asked them if they wish to study further and learn computers. Also, we asked them about their experience of this day. Few of the volunteers from print media were also there to catch all the excitement.

              

We asked our influencers about their experience and here are few of their thoughts:

“It’s a good program conducted by Microsoft. I was very happy to visit schools and educate them on e-based learning and computers. I hope such sessions will be conducted in future too.”

“I will be mentoring all the students in this school for computer education in future as well. I have informed the Head mistress to call me for any free sessions.”

“Session was too good. Students request us to come back for helping or teaching them. They have dreams in their eyes and want someone to show them right direction. We are very thankful to Microsoft team for such a grateful opportunity. THANK YOU SO MUCH”

Going forward, we are working on defining a plan on how we can keep touching these schools to make sure we don’t lose the excitement and the hope which we created among these children. If we can influence 1% of them also to pursue better education/digital education, this activity will be successful

PS: A digital movie coming shortly around “Community Day 2015”

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 04, 2015
  Really a very good initiative by MVP'. This is just the Beginning.....Miles to go from now-------------->>>, further to do something really fruitful for these children :)