Education and Youth Development
Chaupal empowers northern Chhattisgarh’s youth, overcoming education barriers, fostering leadership, and creating community‑driven opportunities.
While the northern Chhattisgarh region has significant demographic potential with a large youth population, it faces interconnected challenges of low educational attainment, high dropout rates, language barriers, limited career opportunities, and youth unemployment. These challenges are particularly acute among Adivasi and marginalized communities. Addressing them requires long-term investment in youth leadership, education access, and community-based action. Empowering local youth as changemakers can strengthen education systems, improve governance, and create sustainable pathways for development in the region. Sensing this, we recently began to work in this domain
Current Projects
Educate Girls Project
Chaupal is working with girls and young women aged 14-29 years who have discontinued their education due to socio-economic challenges such as poverty, early marriage, and limited access to secondary schooling. Across 34 villages in Lundra and Lakhanpur blocks of Surguja district, Chaupal identifies out-of-school girls, mobilizes families, and provides academic support through village-level learning camps. The initiative enables participants to complete Class 10 through open schooling while building literacy, confidence, and life skills. Through this effort, Chaupal is reaching over 1,000 girls and women, promoting education, gender equality, and women’s empowerment in rural communities.
Youth Development – Constitutional Values Fellowship
Chaupal is working to empower young grassroots leaders to address social inequalities and strengthen community participation in local governance. Through this initiative, 50 fellows selected in two cohorts design and implement social action projects over three years, responding to local community needs. Fellows work closely with marginalized communities to improve access to welfare schemes such as ration, pensions, and MGNREGA, while also addressing civic issues like roads, water, drainage, electricity, and local governance challenges. The program focuses on building leadership through structured capacity building, mentoring, and field-based learning on governance, social security systems, forest and land rights, and legal entitlements of vulnerable groups. Fellows also mobilize community collectives to promote active citizenship, equality, and social justice. Through this effort, Chaupal aims to nurture a cadre of committed youth leaders who drive community-led solutions and strengthen inclusive and participatory development.
