Help Children in Maharashtra Code a Brighter Future.

This holiday season, give children in Maharashtra the gift of future-ready education.

Meet Sana, a student from Kudalwadi, Maharashtra.

Unlike many girls her age, Sana’s hopes for her future didn’t feature glamorous careers or independence. In her world, where her father worked as a mechanical dye worker, people from their community rarely ventured into the vast unknown of corporates, computers, and the like. Moreover, women—like her mother, a tailor—rarely left the home to work. So stepping out to ‘change the world’ felt far-fetched, especially for a girl like Sana.

At school, the reality was no different. Sana often felt her voice suppressed by the loud, confident boys around her. When she tried to speak up in class, her words were often ignored – not considered important enough. On the playground, as a girl, she was teased for being meek, her subdued nature seen as cowardice. The relentless taunts ate at her confidence.

However, when she entered our Road to Code program, her curiosity overtook her nervousness. For the first time, as she faced a computer, Sana was free to think beyond the limitations she’d always known.

If you saw her, you wouldn’t think it was her first time coding! In just 2 months, Sana went from doing simple coding tasks with our guidance to independently creating complex animations on Sprite Lab.

So when we asked students to code a solution to a real-life problem, Sana chose an issue very close to her daily experience: bullying in schools.

With every line of code, Sana’s world expanded. Now, her ideas – her voice – had value.

She used the language of code to imagine a different world: where whenever a fight broke out, a female superhero would appear. She didn’t fight physical battles. Instead, she fought for understanding and justice, hearing out both sides with empathy and resolving the conflict peacefully. 

With code, Sana transformed her personal challenge into a digital solution promoting peace and empathy. From a timid girl on the playground, she became an adventurous coder. 

And instead of just being a new tool, coding became an outlet to exercise her agency, creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and most importantly, her voice.

ACCESS TO COMPUTER SCIENCE (CS) EDUCATION = A CATALYST FOR UNLIMITED TRANSFORMATION.

And this doesn’t mean just computers and software – for children like Sana, it gives them the power to create. It allows them to imagine heroic characters fighting everyday battles, or design solutions to real-life problems like traffic congestion in urban slums. They begin working out very real challenges through step-by-step thinking and effective communication. For these children, coding is a gateway to expressing their ideas, developing critical thinking, and learning the 21st-century skills that will propel them into the future.

But today, these children are rapidly falling behind due to insufficient CS infrastructure in public schools. In the US, over 93% of students have access to a computer at school (National Center for Education Statistics, 2021). But in India, only 57.9% of schools have even functional computers.

In Sana’s state of Maharashtra, over 23% of schools do not have any functioning computers (UDISE+ data, 2024-25).

BUT IT DOESN'T HAVE TO STOP HERE – FOR SANA, OR OTHER CHILDREN LIKE HER.

At Leadership for Equity, we aim to equip public schools with essential tech resources, opening up opportunities to integrate 21st-century skills into public education. Through initiatives like hands-on coding sessions, offline algorithm-based challenges, immersive coding hackathons, and coding and robotics labs, we’ve seen what integrating 21st-century skills into public education can do!

Imagine thousands of children, confident to invent fearlessly?

AND IMAGINE IF YOU HAD A ROLE IN IT?

This holiday season, make a donation with a lasting impact. Help us bring accessible, quality STEM education to thousands of public school students like Sana – enabling them to reach their full potential.

Here's what your donation can do:

• $25: Provide a mouse and keyboard, enabling a child to take their first steps in the world of computer science.
• $50: Cover the cost of basic coding software for one computer, opening a window to endless creative possibilities.
• $100: Provide a basic tablet computer to a school, putting the tools to reshape the future in a student’s hands.
• $500: Build a mini computer lab with 2 tablet computers and 1 desktop, enabling entire classrooms of children to innovate boldly.
• $1,000: Build one fully functional 5-seater computer lab for a school, giving students the future-ready classroom experience they deserve.
• $2,000: Build one fully functional 10-seater computer lab for a school, equipping students to step confidently into the future.

By helping us reach our goal – $20,000 – you will:

• Equip 10 schools with state-of-the-art 10-seater computer labs.
• Directly impact 2,000+ children with access to coding, computational thinking, and STEM education.

Let this season be one of impact – help us transform schools and students' lives, one lab at a time.