School of Leadership
A pathway through which children, adolescents and young people learn to understand rights, speak with confidence, act collectively and work alongside the institutions around them.
His Friend Stopped Coming to School. He Was the Only One Who Did Something
A twelve-year-old was sent to work in a market town. The person who noticed was another twelve-year-old.
A boy we will call Aman was sent by his parents to work as a domestic worker in a market town. He was twelve. Whatever the household was facing that made that decision look necessary, it was not cruelty - poverty rarely leaves a family a choice it would defend.
What the record does say is that another boy noticed. Arun - also a pseudonym, also twelve - was Aman’s friend and the information minister of the village Child Parliament. In that forum the children had talked about their rights, about why school mattered, and about how to raise a concern when a child was in trouble.
Arun called CHILDLINE Bahraich about his own friend’s family.
Consider what that costs a child. Loyalty pulls one way. Fear of getting a family in trouble pulls the same way. The easy thing is to say nothing and hope. He picked up the phone instead, because someone had given him a public role and he decided the role meant something.
Then he went with the Baal Prahari team to Aman’s house, and sat there while the adults talked to Aman’s parents about school and about what child labour does to a childhood. The family called Aman home. They enrolled him in the village primary school.
Nobody removed a child from his family here. A friend raised a concern, a family reconsidered, facilitators held the conversation, and a government school took him back. The most important protection system in that village turned out to be a twelve-year-old who was paying attention.
Arun called CHILDLINE about his own friend’s family.
Children See It First
Peers notice an empty seat long before any system does. What they need is a safe route to report and adults who respond without blame.
A twelve-year-old noticing that his friend had stopped coming to school is not an accident. It is what a Child Parliament is actually for - here is the system behind it.
The School of Leadership connects learning with agency. Enrolment and retention matter, and so do voice, constitutional values, gender equality, digital access, livelihood choices and participation in school and village decisions. Children move from being recipients of a service to participants in decisions, and adults move from speaking for children to creating the conditions in which children can speak and be heard.
Why This Work Matters
In Bahraich, Shravasti and adjoining districts, exclusion from school is rarely a single-issue problem. Poverty, gendered work, distance, unsafe mobility, social discrimination, weak school–community relationships and limited access to information reinforce one another.
How Change Happens
Leadership work begins with the child and then engages families, teachers, School Management Committees, Gram Panchayats and the education administration.
“Children and young people learn, lead and shape the conditions of their own development.”
Bridge learning, re-enrolment and retention for children who have left school or never entered it.
Adolescent girls’ collectives, menstrual health and dignity, and work against gendered restrictions on mobility and study.
Skilling and livelihood pathways for young people so earning does not have to replace learning.
Child Parliaments and School Management Committees give children a place in decisions that are usually made without them.
The Structural Vulnerability Cycle, Read From This Programme.
The School of Leadership works at the point where a child leaves education, and at the pressures that push them out.
This child is small and weak for its age. In Bahraich, 1 in 2 children under five is stunted - hunger written permanently into the body, and rarely recovered later in life.
Life skills and health education in learning centres, with referral to nutrition services.
National Family Health Survey 5 · Bahraich (52.1%)
One Community. One Leadership Journey. Many Pathways to Lead.
Communities do not stand still. Children become adolescents, adolescents become young adults, and each generation inherits new opportunities, responsibilities and challenges. Projects are time-bound by nature; communities continue long after they conclude. Progress therefore depends not only on what projects achieve during implementation, but on what communities are able to carry forward after they end.
The challenge is not simply how to implement better projects. It is how to ensure that every generation is equipped to participate, organise, lead, and prepare the next.
Why Leadership Is Lost Between Generations
Leadership rarely fails at one moment. It leaks away where a pathway ends and nothing follows. Select a stage to see how the loss compounds, and what the School of Leadership puts in its place.
Leadership Across Life Stages
Leadership cannot be developed through a single intervention, nor does it emerge at one stage of life. Each stage serves a distinct purpose - not simply preparing individuals for the next programme, but preparing them for a greater role in shaping the lives of others. Select a stage to read what it is for.
Across every stage the purpose stays constant: an expanding sense of responsibility, from finding one’s own voice, to enabling the voices of others, to building communities capable of continuously creating leaders.
Theory of Change
Communities are able to nurture, sustain and renew leadership across generations, enabling individuals and institutions to collectively realise rights and lead their own development. Six reinforcing pathways carry that goal.
A connected pathway from childhood participation to community leadership.
From Developing Leaders to Sustaining Leadership Systems
Over three decades the School of Leadership has shown that leadership can be nurtured across childhood, adolescence, youth and adulthood. The next challenge is to ensure leadership renews itself without remaining dependent on external facilitation. Success will not be measured by the number of leaders trained, but by a community’s ability to produce, mentor and sustain leaders from within.
A Phased Investment Roadmap
The next phase is not about expanding programmes alone. It is about strengthening the systems that let communities continuously nurture leaders, realise rights, adapt to changing contexts and sustain collective action after individual projects have ended. Five shifts, each able to stand on its own - mapped in direct consultation with the communities we work with, over a planning process that ran from 2021 to 2026.
What Makes the Approach Different
Conventional leadership programmes develop a limited number of individuals. DEHAT’s experience suggests leadership only holds when it is designed to be handed on - when each stage prepares people not for the next programme, but for a greater role in shaping the lives of others.
Every Project, in Chronological Order
22 / 22 · 2000 – 2023Cumulative across every capacity-building activity this programme has carried out with children, adolescents and the community-based organisations around them, since 2000.
Everything Above Is on the Record. Choose How You Want to Be Part of What Comes Next.
The register above lists 22 projects in this programme, each with the partner who funded it and what it did. Support of any kind is welcome on the same terms.