The tide decide almost everything on Sagar Island: when the ferry runs, when supplies arrive and when teachers can reach school. Fifteen years ago, they also determined where Sandra Lavie Gojkovic would begin a new life; in isolation from the mainland and deep inside conscience.
Gojkovic was Swiss, and arrived in India with just two shirts, two pairs of trousers and a one-way ticket to Delhi, leaving behind a well-paid career in Dubai, a high-rise apartment in Switzerland and a life of travel and privilege. When she reached Sagar Island, a low-lying delta island in the Bay of Bengal accessible only by boat, she encountered a community where children had littl access to meaningful education. “I saw communities largely left on their own,” she says. “It became quite clear I wanted to work with them.”
In 2012, Gojkovic opened a school in a rented, half-finished government building. Sixty children enrolled in its first year itself. She hired local teachers and personally covered the initial costs, for renovations and salaries to a daily vegetarian meal for every child.
The story behind the school begins from a gap she had observed in the education system during her travels across India. There were government schools in villages, and primary education was technically free and universal. But, she says, many of them were “essentially fictional”. “They existed only on paper,” she says. “There were no teachers, no books, no meals. The children were registered in the schools, which they did not attend.”
Her decision, therefore, was not simply to get children into a school, but to help them stay. Early-morning tuition was introduced for students in classes nine and 10 preparing for board examinations. “Our goal is not simply to get children into school,” she says. “It is to help them stay there long enough to make real choices in life.”
Gojkovic chose to build her own organisation, India School Project, rather than work through an existing one after witnessing what she considered failures in the development sector—from inappropriate educational material to funds being used for personal expenses and children in supposedly protective programmes being neglected. “Good intentions are not enough,” she says. “If you want to create something that genuinely helps people, you have to take responsibility.”
That principle has shaped the organisation’s lean structure as well. A volunteer board in Switzerland, including Gojkovic, doesn’t take salary. Its roughly 20 local employees—teachers, cooks, project managers and social workers—are paid staff. Gojkovic partly funds the organisation through income from a paying job, while raising donations herself. “I would rather keep the organisation small and sustainable than continually make it bigger and then reach a point where I cannot pay people,” she explains. Her work has expanded beyond the classroom. The organisation trains local women in sewing; more than half, Gojkovic says, now work as tailors.
Its work with women and children has grown into a broader protection movement addressing child marriage, domestic violence and trafficking. It has trained 112 youth leaders and reached an estimated 20,000 people across 30 villages. She finds it difficult to separate these problems from the conditions in which villagers live. Poverty, limited education and social pressure often shape decisions around marriage, violence and children’s safety. “On the ground, it is much more complicated,” she says. “Changing a law is one thing. Changing attitudes and giving people the knowledge and confidence to act is a much longer process. But that is where sustainable change begins.”
Her local team, Gojkovic says, understands the community, its families and its culture in ways she never could. “I am a foreigner, and without them, none of this would have been possible.” The work has also taught her to abandon the idea that there is a single formula for development. “A model that works well in one context may not work in another,” she says. The tides still dictate life on Sagar Island. But for the children who come to Gojkovic’s school, the hope is that they will swim to the future with purpose and success.