One Billion Literates Foundation

Our Mission

The mission of OBLF is to bring basic English comprehension and Computer skills to children attending the mass schooling system in India, to provide them an equal opportunity to gain meaningful employment on reaching adulthood.

The foundation works as a partner to the state government and adopts state run/public elementary schools in India. In a country with a billion plus population about 70% of 200 million children who are in elementary schools attend public schools. Reports have told us year on year about the massive learning deficit in the public schooling system. Some of the issues this system is plagued with are poor content, teacher absenteeism, learning by rote and very poor teacher ratios.

The foundation uses the existing infrastructure of public schools mainly in remote rural areas. The children in the adopted schools are divided into levels/groups based on their English skills (and not according to age). The foundation has designed its own child friendly syllabi for each level and uses laptops and tablets (technologies these children have never been exposed to) and other fun filled teaching techniques to teach.

The foundation's strategy is to train and employ semi-educated rural women on a part time basis (this doesn't disturb the rural ethos) to teach in the adopted schools. These women whom we call coordinators are mainly homemakers and live in the rural communities where the adopted schools are. Every adopted school has several children divided into three levels (Junior, Middle and Senior), a few coordinators to do the teaching and urban volunteers who take ownership of the school and mentor the coordinators and supervise the work being done in the school.

Children undergo baseline assessments at the beginning of the school year and then another assessment at the end of an academic year. We also assess a small number of children who attend the schools but are not in the foundation's School Adoption Program. Children who are in the program have consistently performed way better than the ones in the control group.