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.