Mission
Ensure quality, 21st-century education for all.
Vision
Alokito Hridoy Foundation aim is to build an enlightened generation of tomorrow. Through Alokito Hridoy we are creating positive, inspiring and independent individuals who can thrive in our rapidly changing world. Alokito Hridoy School (AHS), runs under the foundation and serves as a laboratory school to test, curate and iterate equitable, quality teaching-learning approaches that can be scaled across the country to develop an enlightened generation of tomorrow.
Our Initiative
The root cause of discrepancies in the job market lies in the early years of education. Children are crammed into a factory model that fails to prepare them for jobs that are yet to exist. To break this vicious cycle with a human-centric approach, we wanted to be more aware of how, where and who we piloted our first intervention with.
We started the school with 100 students in Tangail, Mirzapur, about 50 kilometers north of Dhaka. The first year we educated students up to grade 3, all children of industrial workers. We are now educating 200 children up to grade 7 - our goal is to grow with the students and add a new grade each year. The school has a nominal fee, which adds a sense of accountability to the community and parents.
We knew from the start that a building is not the heart of a school, but rather it is the teachers. We hire local teachers since we know they are the most knowledgeable about the area and the context. Teachers have an impact on students when they connect with them and are interested to learn more about them. We invest heavily in teacher training to nurture and empower them as the empathetic, 21st century facilitators and the catalyst of change in the school and community.
We started gathering evidence in our school to gradually address the problems in the education system. Relentlessly, we came up with one solution after another to provide education that is relevant for now and the future. Gradually, we came up with an education model rooted in empathy, critical thinking, and collaborative problem-solving.
However, no problem can be solved without scale. Currently, by developing teachers using our evidence-based approaches, we scale our model across government and private, English, Bangla and Madrasah medium schools.
