How We Work
Over the last three decades we have developed a wide range of culturally-grounded programmes for children and young people that attempt to address felt needs in the areas of mental health, education and the realisation of personal potentials. More specifically, our programmes focus on early childhood cognitive stimulation, literacy learning during the primary and middle school years and career and livelihood planning during the high school years.
Our Approach
Our approach blends direct service delivery by The Promise Foundation's teams, with resource development, training and capacity building for other organisations who replicate these services in their locations. Hence we work at multiple levels:
Direct Implementation: Core Projects
At the core of The Promise Foundation's interventions are programmes conducted directly by our teams in schools, slums, settlements, and rural areas. These intervention are through our Stimulation Intervention Programmes (SIP) that focus on early childhood cognitive stimulation, Programmes for Assisted Learning (PAL) which are designed to support literacy learning in the early grades and middle school, and our Jiva programme which focuses on career and livelihood planning during the high school years. Over the years, our teams have implemented SIP, PAL and Jiva in over 500 schools, educational institutions and community settings across the country. Our direct engagement keeps us in touch with changing realities on the ground and points us toward emerging trends and new areas to be addressed.
Extension Projects: Resource Creation, Training and Capacity Building
Through this modality we engage with other organisations in the form of partnerships and collaborations. We do this by building the capacity of our partners to use material we have developed or adapt our material for use in their contexts. We also develop material to suit the specific needs of other organisations. These developments are based on surveys and research that we first conduct in order to understand felt needs and thereby develop material that would be culturally, linguistically and economically relevant. Our courses are skills oriented and aim at capacity building. Our trainees typically include adults working with children and youth from socially and economically disadvantaged homes (e.g. teachers, wardens, counsellors, non-formal educators, employment officers, animators, pre-school teachers).
Consultancy and Resource Development
Promise offers consultancy to government, non-governmental and corporate organisations as well international organisations for conceptualising interventions, creating resources, training their workers and developing sustainable systems for programme implementation, assessment and appraisal. We have worked with close to 150 organisations that are involved with children and adolescents. Our programmes have been adapted for use in countries such as the Maldives, Rwanda, Sri Lanka and Vietnam and our ideas have been presented to representatives of governments in more than 30 countries. We have also worked on rigorous reviews of the existing research-base in the area of literacy and foundation learning to produce evidence briefs and policy briefs for multiple stake holders (e.g., policy makers, grant agencies, monitoring and evaluation teams, trainers, commentators).
Our most important objective is to function as a Resource Group that supports and builds the capacity of other organisations already working for children and youth.
It is through our resource creation and training programmes that we hope to see our research and models replicated on a larger scale.