Just a kilometre away from NIT Patna, one of the premier engineering colleges of the country, is a small government girls school. Students of Ayub Urdu School come from conservative families, and their parents usually work as hawkers.

Fourteen-year-old Zehra used to be beaten up by her elder brother for merely pursuing her education. “Bhaijaan would dominate my mother too", she would say.

At one point, Zehra's mother had struggled to even pay Rs 300 for her daughter's school fees. But the scholarship money had taken a burden off of her shoulders. Similarly, Iqra, who had dropped out of a CBSE school earlier, would have dropped out from Ayub Urdu School too, had it not been for the scholarship.

Dropping out of school means that the children would either join their parents at work and the household chores or be married off.  

Of the 81,146 schools in Bihar, students of 75,142 schools cannot even apply for scholarships schemes because their schools are neither registered nor verified on the National Scholarship Portal.  A child can apply for public scholarships only if their school or college is listed on the NSP.

Hence we, at YDF, work to improve the delivery of public scholarship schemes. We use heavy tech to identify the students and institutes that are not receiving the benefit of scholarships. We then locate local organisations in their vicinity and reach out to them. We create a cluster of in-need schools with a local organisation that can support them. We partner with and train these organisations to help institutions become scholarship-ready and help students apply for relevant scholarship schemes.

In the last four years, we have helped more than 7673 students in Bihar get scholarships worth INR 4 crores.

We request your support to help us further reach out to lakhs of Zehras and Iqras.