Pragati School

Pragati Hijra School is designed to address these issues. Pragati will be a 2-year residential institution combining remedial secondary education and leadership development skills. For now Pragati is being run as a traditional nonprofit project. Our hope is to transfer operation of the school to the community as soon as possible, but for now we're... exploiting the exchange rate between the dollar and the rupee to get the school built. We want to develop community resources. That includes a goal of having as many transgendered people teaching in the school as possible. To support that goal, next June a contingent of educated hijras will begin a year of teacher training at the Ananya Centre for Teachers, a unique Bangalore institution set up to train teachers. Ananya's founder, Dr. Shashi Rao, invented methods of teaching slum children who haven't had success with a traditional classroom. These folks, and a few volunteers, will become our initial compliment of teachers. The Hijra community currently has a member, Anne's 'niece' Anu, working on the project. She's recruiting the teacher trainees.Read More