Author: thegoodsight

Room to Read’s #IndiaGetsReadingAtHome campaign was an active enabler for India’s education system during the COVID-19 pandemic which is rearing its head again 

Room to Read is a global organization transforming the lives of millions of children in low-income communities by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education. Founded in 2000, on the belief, World Change Starts with Educated Children®, its innovative model focuses on deep, systemic transformation within schools during two time periods that are most critical in a child’s schooling: early primary school for literacy acquisition and secondary school for girls’ education.

Room to Read India was established in India in 2003 and presently has programs in eleven states – Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Delhi NCR, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Telangana, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh benefitting 4.79 million children. The non-profit collaborates with local communities, partner organizations, and governments to develop literacy skills and a habit of reading among primary school children and ensure girls can complete secondary school with the skills necessary to negotiate key life decisions. With over 11 million distributed books, Room to Read India’s Literacy Program has been implemented in 18,172 government schools, training 29,671 teachers trained in library management and reading activities. The organization’s Girls’ Education Program has benefitted over 82,073 girls. For more, please visit: www.roomtoread.org.

Initiatives

Nearly 321 million children were reported out of school by March 2020[1]. Considering the pandemic, the traditional educational system has undergone subsequent disruption. In the geographies that Room to Read India caters to, many of the early grade (1 to 5) learners are 1st generational learners. They come from a home environment that typically does not encourage learning. As children are spending more time at home, parents and caregivers act as important stakeholders to help in developing a holistic learning environment. Hence, the need for promoting Home as a Learning Space had been brought to the forefront.

By promoting Home as a Learning Space, Room to Read India has created a strong linkage between the school and community thereby supporting them within the larger learning ecosystem for overall development of the children in primary grade. Going beyond the classroom structure, Room to Read India worked with teachers, local community members, parents and caregivers by strengthening their capacities and encouraging them to promote learning environment at home. Continued efforts were also seen to keep children encouraged and motivated throughout the new learning journey.

The annual literacy campaign #IndiaGetsReadingAtHome also gained immense support reaching approx. 7,072,33 people across 9 states (offline). The theme for 2021 was #MainJahanSeekhnaWahan (learning is where I am) and the campaign directly benefitted approx. 2,71,634 early grade learners and actively engaged more than 2,02,705 parents and caregivers.

In a child’s life, the early years of development are the most crucial period for nurturing their motor (emotional growth) and linguistic skill (mental growth). As is seen from Room to Read’s long experience early learners who have received support, go a long way to developing successful careers, achieve higher levels of confidence and actively take on leadership roles.

In the middle of crisis today, the educational system has suffered a lot and the learning loss reported is even more jarring. Room to Read India believes that learning can happen anywhere and all that a child requires is an enabling learning environment. Home as a Learning Space is an initiative that keeps a child motivated and parents/caregivers encouraged with learning. Moreover, the learnings at home eventually help a child grow at the school level as well.

Linkages with the SDGs

Room to Read’s programs is directly linked to SDG4, ensuring QUALITY EDUCATION. Room to Read believes, that Education is the solution to the world’s biggest problems —poverty, conflict, disease, intolerance, inequality, and exploitation. With Education, it is possible to break the cycle of illiteracy and poverty within a single generation.

All of Room to Read’s programs are designed towards creating, inclusive and equitable quality education spaces. This is crucial to promoting lifelong learning opportunities. 

Room to Read’s Literacy Program, focused on strengthening foundational literacy among early grade learners, to ensure that children get access to quality education (SDG4.2), which leads to effective learning outcomes. While the non-profit’s Gender Education Program is geared towards achieving gender equality and inclusion (SDG 4.5)by equipping girls with crucial Lifeskills education. Lifeskills education promotes continued education for adolescent girls, by lowering dropout and early marriages, thus improving outcomes towards achieving universal youth literacy (SDG 4.6) 

By focusing on improving quality education, Room to Read also indirectly approaches SDG1- NO POVERTY, SDG 10-REDUCED INEQUALITIES and SDG 3-GOOD HEALTH. Room to Read paves the path for long-term systemic change across low-income communities through innovative solutions and partnerships with governments. 

Defining development

“We envision a world where every child can reach their full potential through quality education and be an active participant in society. Although the potential is abundant, access to opportunity is scarce. Room to Read as an organization works diligently to ensure the potential and opportunities go hand-in-hand. To achieve this, Room to Read India developed simplified, actionable structures and systems that could be implemented by government, local, and school communities to improve learning outcomes and improve access to quality education. Education alone can positively influence health, environment, poverty, and entire economies.”

 Poornima Garg, Deputy Country Director, Room to Read India

---

[1]https://www.livemint.com/news/india/lockdown-has-put-321-million-indian-children-out-of-school-widened-learning-gaps-11590137598404.html were out of school

DEVI Sansthan’s Global Dream program offers an innovative pedagogy to enable foundational literacy and numeracy to be taught in just 50 hours!

By Tom Delaney, Master Trainer, DEVI Sansthan

This article offers a summary of DEVI Sansthan’s work towards Literacy for All. We begin by examining why literacy is important, and then look at the scale of the illiteracy crisis. We then share the principles underpinning Global Dream program, which enables literacy to be taught swiftly, by anyone, anytime, anywhere. We go on to explore partnerships and initiatives, and discuss outcomes, impact and ways forward.

Why Literacy?

Literacy is the foundation for all education, and is a crucial human right. Recognizing this, the SDGs aim to ensure that ‘all children complete a quality education’ (4.1) and ‘all youth and a substantial proportion of adults achieve literacy and numeracy’ (4.6). Literacy impacts many crucial areas of life:

• Self-confidence & empowerment. There is often a sense of shame in using a thumb impression, whereas literate people tend to be much more self-confident. Learning to read is an important step on the journey of empowerment.
• Civic participation. Illiterate people struggle to engage meaningfully as citizens in the civic process; literacy strengthens democracy. Recent research has shown that literacy rate is strongly correlated with the desire to be governed democratically.
• Population stabilization. Growth in literacy rates leads to a decline in fertility rates, and hence population growth rates. This is primarily through young women becoming more empowered to make decisions about when to have children and how many children to have.
• Health. Literacy has a huge positive impact on public health. Reading increases the ability of people to engage well with the healthcare system and follow basic public health measures. Literacy has a particularly powerful effect on lowering infant mortality.
• Income. There is a strong positive correlation between literacy and income level. This is true both at the individual level (literate people earn more) and the national level (countries with higher literacy rates tend to have higher per capita GDP).

The Problem: Illiteracy Crisis

Though literacy is a crucial skill, hundreds of millions of people still lack it. India has over 250 million illiterate adults – far more than any other country. We also suffer from low rates of learning in schools: only half of Grade 5 students can read a Grade 2 text in their mother-tongue, and even by Grade 8, one third of students can’t solve a division problem.

This problem is not just India’s. A recent World Bank report revealed that an estimated 53% of children in low-income-countries (LICs) around the world are in learning poverty. The situation has been further worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has wiped out 2 decades of educational progress, and pushed millions of children into child labour and underage marriages.

Our Solution: Global Dream

To achieve literacy for all, we need to mobilize all for literacy. This requires simplified teaching-learning materials and methods, enabling anyone and everyone to teach swiftly and effectively. To this end, we have developed the Global Dream Toolkits, which uses an innovative pedagogy to enable foundational literacy and numeracy to be taught in just 50 hours. Global Dream is available in 13 languages.

The program is based on these key principles & practices:

• Short modules: We keep our sessions short, 15-30 minutes. Rather than trying to teach the whole alphabet initially, each lesson introduces only 6-10 letters and gives the learner plenty of practice to master them.
• Moving from known to unknown: the learner is asked to recognize pictures and from there learn letters. Rather than ‘/a/ se anaar’, we reverse the order ‘anaar: /a/’. Similarly, in numeracy, we use hands-on materials before introducing abstract representations; an approach known as Concrete-Pictorial-Abstract.
• Asking questions: We ask questions of the learner, for example, ‘What is this picture?’, ‘What is its first sound?’ This is much more effective than rote memorization, and ensures that learning is long-term and deeper.
• Games & activities: Lessons are reinforced and brought to life using many games and activities (for example, matching picture and letter cards).
• Independent & Peer learning: The process is learner-centred and driven, and the simple materials enable people to teach themselves and help their peers. The teacher acts as a facilitator rather than an instructor.

Our initiatives

We are partnering with many stakeholders, striving to reach our target population of illiterate children (both in and out of school) and adults (with an emphasis on women). DEVI seeks to catalyze a people’s movement for literacy, by working with key sectors of society:

• Government. DEVI has partnered with state governments in Uttar Pradesh and Telangana to run programs to improve school education and mobilize school students to teach adults in their community how to read. An international partnership with the government of Maldives is also in the pipeline. The government-affiliated National Service Scheme has also partnered with us in Lucknow, where we have trained and equipped college student volunteers to teach literacy in slums.
• NGOs & community groups. DEVI uses its skills and experience to partner with many NGOs, including Sahbhagi, Magic Bus, Teach for India and Oxfam. We provide training and materials, and are knowledge partners as they implement literacy programs in a wide variety of contexts, from schools to adult literacy centres.
• Private schools. DEVI’s Each One Teach One program mobilizes and trains school and college students to teach literacy.

Outcomes, Impacts and Way Forward

Through our own initiatives and the excellent work of our partners and stakeholders, we are proud to have contributed to the struggle for literacy for all. Some of the key outcomes and impacts of our work include:

• We have distributed around 500,000 literacy toolkits, primarily to school and college student volunteers; through which an estimated 200,000 people have become literate. This has had tremendous impact on the lives of the neo-literates: building self-confidence, social equality, economic resilience and general well-being.
• Innumerable school and college student volunteers report being profoundly impacted by their experiences, including a greater sensitivity to poverty and social issues, and a desire to work for change.
• In collaboration with the district government, we conducted a large-scale survey of literacy in Lucknow, finding that the literacy rate is much lower than the Census suggests. This culminated in a paper, The Inconvenient Truth of Illiteracy Inequality, published in Economic & Political Weekly.

We are looking to continue scaling up the campaign for literacy, through further initiatives:

• Launching the Disruptive Global Movement to End Literacy Poverty, a series of online and in-person conferences in which stakeholders commit to and report on action for literacy, share stories and are inspired.
• Global Dream App, containing a series of video lessons and interactive games, enabling literacy to be taught easily and for free, without requiring paper materials.
• Our book, Ending Literacy Poverty: A Roadmap for Urgent Global Action, is due to be published by Bloomsbury shortly.

DEVI – Dignity, Education, Vision International was formed under the leadership of Dr Sunita Gandhi in 1992 in Lucknow with the view that dignity is the most important propelling force and education is the most important driver of change in a human being; and we need to move towards a world embracing vision in which all people have equality of opportunity to receive a meaningful education and live with dignity.