ReadingWise Education Programs

The problem we are trying to solve is below-poverty-line women do not have the study skills and other life skills necessary to become employable in the organised sector.

Our solution is to work with local NGOs to do the following:

1. Identify illiterate or partially-literate women who want to get skilled and give them our proven literacy programs.  (Over 235,000 verified graduates to date)

2. Apply our confidence-building programs to give them the confidence to work in an organisation.  (Over 45,000 graduates to date)

3. Teach them accelerated learning techniques so they can get vocationally trained quickly and thoroughly.  (We use tried and tested techniques used by millions of people throughout the world)

At least a billion people (mostly women) are illiterate.

Another billion have learning difficulties which prevents them getting vocational training.

Around a third of all women experience emotional or physical abuse at some time in their lives.

Female empowerment requires women to be able to extricate themselves from subsistence living where they are trapped geographically, financially and emotionally.  

The problem in the past has been that programs have not been effective enough to make more than a small dent in the problem.  Adult literacy programs have had high drop out rates and low economic impact.  A huge proportion of women the world over have low self-esteem despite available life skills programs.  Emotional and physical bullying of women is rife in almost every sector of society and every area geographically.

We have found that making women literate is life-changing - it increases their self-esteem and empowers them in their family and their community.  

We have a series of tried and tested best-of-breed very short programs mixing IT and classroom techniques which do the following:

• Astonishingly effecitve literacy programs for various languages which use accelerated memory techniques;
• Programs which alleviate dyslexia and other disabilities that overcome the barriers preveting such people from getting properly trained;
• A confidence and communication skills program developed by psychologists which cures shyness;
• A how-to-study program so people with minimal education can handle training materials.

In short, we can take teenagers and adults from illiteracy to vocational training in just a few months.

These are web applications that can work online or offline, on laptops or tablets or smartphones.  

Our target populations are:

Anyone who would like to get vocational training but who is currently prevented from doing so by virtue of one or more of the following:

• they are illiterate
• they have a learning disability
• their family discourage them from studying
• they don't know how to study
• they have low self-esteem.

The programs will break down the barriers to women getting trained.  When they get trained, they can get well-paid jobs.  When they are well-paid, their position in the family is transformed, as is their self-esteem and life satisfaction level.

The problem in universal education is illiteracy.

There are around a billion illiterates in the world.

The biggest part of that is women's literacy.

Our main achievement has been a successful literacy program that has mostly been attended by women.

Enabling women to read and write, reducing their shyness and teaching them how to study is essential to enabling to go on to further training and employment.

The history of adult literacy programs is mostly of feeble results.  The success rates have been low, and the drop-out rates have been low.  Many countries have given up on adult literacy.  

We decided to build programs that work, that get somebody reading in two months or less, and have very low drop out rates.  We have achieved that.  

See www.taraakshar.org

The reason we achieved it is because the team that built the program were people who were experts in memory techniques AND experts in IT, AND experts in large scale national training programs.

The core technique that makes our program work is pedagogical - we have discovered how to use memory techniques and build them into web applications so even complete illiterates can learn very very fast.

The IT aspect is very straight forward - we have built a conventional LMS (Learning Management System) and many thousands of lessons in straightforward HTML/CSS/Javascript.

What makes our programs outstanding is the pedagogy in them.  We use about 30 different pedagogical techniques that enable us to work with illiterates and dyslexics and the learning disabled.

Some of these techniques are very tried and tested - you can read about them in the books of Tony Buzan and Gordon Dryden and Desmond O'Brien.  Other techniques have been invented by us, using our psychotherapy and special needs backgrounds.

www.cdedse.org/pdf/work251.pdf
www.readingwiseint.com/info/downloads/IkeaTaraAksharTestimonial.pdf
youtu.be/jldwXwZec84

We have proven solutions that have worked in several countries.

We have already impacted the lives of around 300,000 people, mostly women, either in terms of self-esteem or empowerment or simply by getting trained so they can get a well-paid job.  

We are not reinventing any wheels here.  We just want to rework what we have done before in different languages for different countries so we can scale up globally.

Current total graduates = 300,000

In one year, total graduates = 400,000

In 5 years, total graduates = 3 million

Go from 300,000 graduates to 3 million graduates in the next 5 years.

In the next year, start programs in at least one Arab country, and either West Bengal or Bangladesh.

1.  Getting government buy-in to the idea that it is worth attempting to make illiterate adults literate.

2.  Finding competent local NGOs that we can work with to implement our programs.

We have found that the best way to work with governments is to not rely on them, but work with donors and NGOs.

But somewhere along the line, we have to get governments to buy-in, so we will continue to network, network, network until we can achieve that. 

2 full-time in Spain

1 full-time in Singapore

1 full-time in India 

2 part-time in UK

PLUS our partner NGO in India has a large team whose numbers fluctuate according to current funding

Our partner NGO in India has made 235,000 illiterate women literate in the last 15 years.  The short time taken for each learner to achieve this, plus the low drop out rate, is almost certainly the best in the world.  This has been fully documented.  

Our international team includes the following:

Victor Lyons is a former Visiting Research Fellow at the Royal Institution of Greeat Britain.  He has set up therapy centres for crime victims with traumatic memories in London and Florida.  He has written several different literacy programs which will be used in this project.  He has lived and worked in the UK, USA, India, Kenya and Spain.

Sara Worsley ran a ground-breaking educational program for 10 years in the UK for special needs learners and adolescents in trouble with the law.  She has been an advisor to the UK government on this, and is a published author on the subject.

Dr Tejwant Chhatwal has a PhD from Stanford on the subject of multiple intelligences.

Jeff Ross is an expert on education assessments and initiates international conferences on this subject.

John Kerr is a former Chairman of Edexcel, the UK's largest awarding organisation offering academic, vocational and work-based learning qualifications.

Kalaivani Subramaniam is a teacher in Singapore who runs an NGO in Sri Lanka for disadvantaged schoolchildren.

Our partner NGO in India - Development Alternatives - is headed by Dr Ashok Khosla, one of the world's leading experts on sustainable development.

The NGO Development Alternatives in India implements all our literacy programs in India.  Victor Lyons worked with them full-time to develop our first literacy program - Tara Akshar -  and has acted as consultant since.  He advises on pedagogy and sources of funding.  

We work with NGOs (or occasionally for-profits) in various countries.  We licence our e-learning solutions to them.  We help them raise funding for implementing these solutions.  This funding has been mostly from governments and aid organisations providing grant-aid money.  When possible, we ask for a royalty or a contribution to R&D for the programs.  When not possible, we do our work for free. 

Our expenses are very low.  There are two of us who live in relative isolation who write these programs.  When a program takes off and scales up, like our Hindi literacy program, we will get an income.  While programs are small scale, we don't earn any money and we live on our pensions and savings. 

A small amount of funding will enable us to copy and distribute our groundbreaking Hindi and English literacy programs into other languages.  

We have already changed the lives of 300,000 people.  With a small grant, we can upscale this to several million people.

We need to find viable functional competent NGOs in various countries who will partner with us to cure their illiteracy problems.  (And even developed countries have serious literacy problems - half the prison population of the UK and the USA are functionally illiterate.)

We need to work with those NGOs to raise funds for these projects.  We have done it successfully in India, but we want to do it in other countries.

80% of our 300,000 graduates have been women.

Women have much higher illiteracy rates than men in developing countries.

Making a woman literate makes a huge difference to her self-esteem and position in the family.  It is the most effective form of empowerment that we have seen in development programs.

Our head office in Spain is 4 hours drive from Portugal and 30 minutes by boat from Morocco.

We intend to set up a program in Portugal for adults with special needs who have difficulty reading.  (We did this successfully in London 7 years ago.)

We intend to set up a program in Morocco for adult illiterates to learn to read Darija.  Morocco has a very high illiteracy rate in rural areas.