Help create a Billion Literates!

Welcome to the dream of having One Billion Literates in India. As Gandhiji said, India lives in its villages. So we, at OBLF, decided that to change our country, we need to emancipate our rural youth from the chain of poverty and deprivation, arising from lack of quality education.

We fill the void in the public education system, by imparting basic English and computer skills to the children attending government schools in the rural areas, because we believe that in today’s globalized world, the knowledge of these two subjects can propel a child to aspire for high ranking white collar jobs, rather than the routine land-related or blue collar jobs the previous rural generations had to settle for.

Since the basis of any good education is the basic foundation that is laid, we teach in rural Government primary schools. This quarter saw the beginning of a new academic year, and we commenced the year as usual with a Baseline assessment, wherein each child – of the total 1025 – is assessed in English proficiency – both, spoken and written. Our rural Coordinators now use the Tablet very effectively as a tool of Assessment. Children are then placed in 4 groups – Junior, Junior High, Mid-level and Senior – based on this assessment, and not on the school grade they are in. This way, each child gets a proper foundation and no child is left behind. Also, we recognize that children learn at their own pace, but the public education system fails to take that into account.

We have developed our own content at all four levels and extensively use laptops, tablets, activity cards, story-telling, songs etc. as tools of pedagogy. Our aim is to teach, without the child knowing that s/he is learning. Interaction between teachers and students is given a lot of importance and hence we keep the average student / teacher ratio to about 20:1

Our program is very popular with both parents and children. The kids are interested enough in it to even come one hour before the school starts. This pleases the parents who have to leave home early for work, and are assured that the children are in a safe environment, utilizing their time fruitfully.  And that is why this academic year, we were able to expand our program from 15 rural government schools with 500 children, to 25 schools impacting over 1000 children.

After all, any program is only as good as the happiness quotient of its beneficiaries.