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TARA Akshar+

Critical Need Being Addressed

Despite several decades of programs to introduce literacy among adults, more than 50% of the women and girls in many poor countries, including India, cannot read, write or count, preventing them from participating fully in the social, economic and political processes of the modern State.

Description of Initiative

The TARA Akshar+ program is an initiative of the Development Alternatives Group, a social enterprise dedicated to accelerating sustainable development in the global South, particularly India. Eradication of poverty, stabilizing the climate and conserving biodiversity all need active citizen participation, which requires empowered individuals and communities, capable of acquiring the knowledge they need in a rapidly changing world.

In the four years since DA initiated development of TARA Akshar+ it has trained more than 57,000 women to read, write and make simple calculations across 7 of the most illiterate states in India. A remarkable feature of this programme is its extraordinary pass rate: more than 95%. This is due to highly effective and standardized teaching methods using computers and entertaining heuristics, a solid delivery system, extremely short duration of courses, and convenience of location, timings, etc.

TARA Akshar + is able to deliver complete literacy and numeracy in just 98 contact hours over a period of 49 days by using a totally new mix of advanced memory techniques like memory hooks through animated movies and strong learning reinforcement mechanisms. Specifically, it uses:
• "Laubach Method", which associates each letter to the shape of an object, the name of which BEGINS with that letter.
• Innovative visual imagery and video gaming concepts.
• Cartoon animations, flash cards, games and easy to recall story lines.
• A combination of aural, visual and kinesthetic memory techniques to aid letter-sound retention.
• A careful combination of numeric and literary study.
• Only high school graduate instructors, trainers and quality monitors.
• Constant monitoring of quality of delivery and literacy outcomes.
• High numbers of willing learners because of convenient locations and timings.
• Reaching out to people in difficult and remote areas through the use of laptops.

BFI Assessment Summary

Of the 1 billion people who are illiterate in the world, two thirds of them are women. According to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), literacy among women improves livelihoods across the community, leads to better child and maternal health and has a positive ripple effect on all development indicators like housing, income, water, and sanitation. TARA Akshar+ is a unique adult literacy program launched in 2005 that seeks to produce functional literacy in 100 minutes a day over a 30 day period, and has gotten excellent results. The main focus has been on women in rural parts of India.

It was initiated by the Development Alternatives Group (DAG), a not-for-profit enterprise headed up by Ashok Kohsla, who holds a Ph.D in Experimental Physics from Harvard. In 1983, Kohsla abandoned his pursuit of a scientific career to focus on issues of environment and development. A comprehensive strategist, he created a social enterprise that successfully combines science and technology with sustainability practices to deliver education, training, and entrepreneurial opportunities to the rural poor of India, so they can raise their standard of living while also protecting ecosystems, conserving resources, and reducing carbon emissions.

DAG’s work spans a large range of services and products. These include programs that bring the risks of climate change to the immediate attention of communities in central India’s semi-arid regions and train them in community-led pollution monitoring, adaptation, mitigation, and carbon neutrality. DAG also spearheads R & D of affordable machinery for rural markets, including energy-conserving machines that produce high quality, affordable roofing tiles and pavers, compressed earth blocks, fired bricks, recycled paper, handloom textiles, cooking stoves, non-wood briquette presses, and biomass-based electrical generators. Nested in this system of programing is TARA Akshar+ the literacy program.

TARAhaat, the entity delivering the literacy program, is one of several market-based social enterprise arms of DAG. It has been focused on “bridging the digital divide between rural communities and the mainstream economy.” For example, The Lifelines Project uses mobile telephone technology to connect poor farmers across 1,500 villages to critical agricultural information though volunteers. TARAhaat has also been involved in a rapidly growing effort to create local, franchised “tele-centers”. With 200 in place so far, these centers bring information technology to rural villages, particularly to youth, and offer customized services such as community development and vocational and business management training.

Over the past 5 years, the capable TARAhaat team has rolled out the TARA Akshar+ literacy program to more than 60,000 people (mostly women) in over 270 literacy teaching centers across some of the poorest, most illiterate areas of North India, with excellent results. They are aiming for a major scale-up effort in partnership with India’s Department of Education, which had been slow in recognizing the power of this new approach, but is on its way to becoming convinced as a result of research they conducted themselves to assess the impact of the literacy program.

DAG and its Technology and Action for Rural Advancement (TARA) affiliates are taking a comprehensive systems approach to addressing rural poverty in the context of sustainability. The pedagogical underpinnings and use of technology in the TARA Akshar+ literacy program not only represents a pragmatic breakthrough with enormous potential to leverage the impact of the DAG’s holistic strategy, but it could be a hugely important Trimtab toward transforming the lives of 100’s of millions of India’s illiterate women.

PEOPLE: TARA Akshar+

Development Alternatives Group Nearly 30 years of delivering Eco-solutions The Development Alternatives Group is a premier research organisation, with a deep understanding of the rural market and a strong presence in the Indian heartland. Its existence has been a credible and visible one – nationally and internationally in addressing poverty challenges in a climate sensitive environment. A pioneer in sustainable development and the first social enterprise in India, Development Alternatives (DA) envisions a world where every citizen can live in security, with a dignified job and an assured income. We believe that the key to achieving this is the creation of sustainable livelihoods in large numbers - providing the rural poor with jobs with decent income, giving meaning and dignity to life, producing goods and services for the local market and preserving the environment.

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