Help create a Billion Literates!

Summer Holidays are fun for children – and it was no different for about 130 to 150 rural children who attended our annual 5-week Summer Program which concluded on 19^th May. OBLF conducts this program at a single centre for multiple reasons – First, children from scores of village schools gather in one place and get a chance to make new friends. All our rural Coordinators work together, providing them with a unique opportunity to observe and learn from each other and from their trainers and volunteers. For the children, it also means continuity in their knowledge of English and being constructively engaged while their parents are off to work, leaving them unsupervised. And this year, there was an added incentive – the Government of Karnataka provided mid-day meals during summer too!

Thanks to a few supporting Corporates, we had 4 Travel tempos picking up and dropping children safely from distant villages, to the Program venue daily. The children simply love this “school bus” experience, which is a novelty for them. Besides, our Program is all about learning with games, puzzles, activity cards, story-telling, songs, rhymes, craft, drawing, laptops, and Tablets, which makes it a whole lot of fun every minute of the time.  

It is for this reason that many of our ex-OBLF children keep returning to our Summer Program. OBLF runs its Program of teaching English only in Primary schools. But Kavya V, (as well as a few others), who was in our Program while at the Hale Chandapura Primary school, has attended our Summer Program every year, even though it is 3 years since she went to High School. And the results are there to see. This year Kavya appeared for her SSLC exams (the State Board exams for completing High School) and scored 95% in English and 93% overall.

Each such success story spurs us on to work harder to impact more lives.

On the Rural Children

OBLF’s school year came to a close at the end of February, and our Year-end Assessments were held from 20^th to 25^th February, 2017 for each of our over 1000 children.

An analysis of the same shows that 96% of the children (who had at least 60 days’ attendance), improved in their English language skills.

The Assessment results show that 64% children scored over 60% marks at the year-end, as against only 11% at the beginning of the year. Also, children studying in the same schools / grades, but not attending OBLF program, have a very poor performance level – all of them scoring less than 30%.

A detailed school-wise report is attached.

On the Rural Ladies

Our senior Coordinators now conduct Oral Assessments independently. As mentioned in our previous report, these rural ladies are also our target beneficiaries, and therefore it is our aim to make them not just financially, but also intellectually independent.

Therefore, their training, instead of being for a fixed period, is an ongoing, continuous process. Once a week, all our ladies – we call them Coordinators – assemble for training in English, Computers, Tools of pedagogy, soft skills etc. They are also sent out for training to various Corporates or institutions like British Library, or we have guest trainers like Mrs. Usha Kumar, ex-Dean HRD, Mt. Carmel College, come in to train them.

• Inpact of our Intervention (PDF)
  
• Analysis of Assessments (PDF)