Our founding partner MelJol was created by Jeroo Billimoria in 1991, when ethnic riots arose across Mumbai, deepening societal divisions. Aflatoun’s founder developed an effective approach to bridge social differences and create peace agents amongst upper and lower class children. The programme MelJol implemented sought to bring together children from diverse socio-economic backgrounds to learn about each other’s lives, cultures, challenges and achievements.

MelJol’s efforts and consistent advocacy for children’s rights played an important role in and paved the way for Aflatoun’s vision to equip every child with social and financial skills. The organisation redefined its child rights education and saving concept, naming it Aflatoun Social and Financial Education Programme. That is how Aflatoun International was conceived, providing children with the skills they need to confront challenges in an increasingly intricate society and stimulate the economic development of their communities through social enterprises.

The programme was applauded by government leaders in many Indian states and it has now spread to eleven states in the country. Together with fourteen local NGOs, MelJol is implementing Aflatot, Aflatoun and Aflateen in and outside of the school system. According to the 2016 annual survey, more than 514,406 children in 3,923 schools have benefited from MelJol’s work and more than 3,782 teachers have received training on Aflatoun’s child-centred teaching methodologies.

MelJol is a leading organisation in our global network in national integration initiatives. Chhatisgarh state has signed MoUs with MelJol, and Himachal Pradesh state has shared a letter of understanding with MelJol, to pilot interventions to see relevance of social and financial education to their state curriculum.

Himachal Pradesh state started a pilot programme in 2016 in 90 secondary schools, benefiting more than 9,000 students. As a result of the successful piloting, the Himachal Pradesh state plans to scale up the pilot to cover more secondary schools in coming years.

Similarly, Chhatisgarh has begun the process of implementing social and financial education in all of its 13,000 secondary schools, impacting more than 500,000 students in 27 districts. More than 54 national teachers have been trained in the state. Together with MelJol trainers, these educators will train 270 district level trainers in the coming months. All trained teachers will be able to teach Aflatoun’s social and financial education to school children.

To ensure the quality of its programmes, MelJol has developed monitoring tools and has been using it to map the progress of its interventions across and ensure the quality of service. MelJol shares all the monitoring tools with the state government, who also monitor the progress. Finally, MelJol is in advance stage of discussion with the entrepreneur student of IIT-Mumbai to develop a mobile based application to provide handheld support to teachers and students. Teachers and children will be able to access learning videos and animations to understand the concept of social and financial education.