Going inside real classrooms leads to practical understanding and immediate action
We've signed an MoU with the Ministry of Education, Maldives, to enhance learning levels of children studying in all 213 government schools of the country. Hear Dr Abdullah Rasheed, the Minister of State for Education, Maldives, give his views on the transformative ALfA program.
In collaboration with Literacy Chicago, the ALfA English toolkit has been converted into videos. The program is being piloted with low-literacy adult learners from marginalized communities in Chicago, with impressive results. Experience the excitement of the first learner.
A school in Guyana is taking up the 45 Days to FLN Challenge, benefitting around 200 children. The school is using the ALfA e-Learning materials to give its students a high-quality, low-carbon education.
DEVI has conducted an online training for teachers for Arca Beta NGO, who are now implementing ALfA in their school in Iquitos, Peru. We hope that the impressive learning results will inspire more organisations to join the campaign.
We collaborated with Path Youth NGO to run a literacy and numeracy bootcamp for children in Mombassa using ALfA materials. Outcomes include improved skills for 102 children, increased learning motivation, enhanced teacher quality, and strengthened community support with volunteer teachers.
Teachers, principals & government officials gathered together from eight different countries to join an interactive workshop on the ALfA pedagogy, sowing the seeds for ALfA to bloom in South-East Asia. In Malaysia, we began an ALfA pilot in collaboration with Radiant Gems Preschool.
Having partnered with Dawnbreakers Foundation to replicate the material in Filipino, they are now using it to teach in a remote area of Mindoro.
We are partnering with El Dorado South Hindu School to trial ALfA.
After successful implementation of its ALfA Disruptive FLN Program in the Shamli district of Uttar Pradesh, the department of school education has signed an MOU to implement this in 15 districts of Uttar Pradesh. So far we've expanded to 180 schools of Lucknow, Unnao and Barabanki districts.
Devi Sansthan has been working closely with the district administration to improve the learning levels of school students - initially in 10 schools, and then 200. The impressive results have attracted media attention, and have also been discussed in a recent book by Prof. Reimers of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Based on poor results in the National Achievement Survey (2017) Sambalpur was declared a low performing district. DEVI Sansthan has been working in 10 schools of Sambalpur since August 2022, with discussions underway to scale up the program across the district.
An MoU has been signed with the Department of Education, Chatra, Jharkhand to fill post-Covid FLN gaps of government school children of grades 1-5. In the first phase, 50 government schools will be covered followed by a district wide scale-up. Inspired by visionary leaders such as Rajnath Singh, DEVI will work with the district government to ensure literacy for all.
Every year since 2014, DEVI runs the Each One Teach One Campaign, in which school and college students use our literacy materials to teach an illiterate child or adult how to read. A five year MoU with CMS Lucknow means that 25,000 student volunteers (Grade 5-11) will participate in the campaign each year, adopting illiterate learners and helping them achieve Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (Grade 3 level).
In August 2018, DEVI Sansthan launched a collaboration with the National Service Scheme of Lucknow University. We have been motivating and training college students to teach illiterate children and adults using the ALfA materials. Over 1,100 students from 15 colleges have taken the training, and 700 ALfA kits have been distributed.
Students of City International School, Lucknow have been a driving force behind the Each One Teach One campaign. Some are teaching the school's support staff, others their own maids. Along with the generous support of SBI Life, CIS has been working to help make children of nearby slums Chandan and Sugamau literate.
MS Education chose five teachers to become master trainers, who are working to spread the message of service to staff and students throughout MS Education and beyond. MS Education school and college students are a key part of the ‘Each One Teach One’ campaign. Their vision is a chain reaction of pass-it-on literacy: that some of the people who have learnt to read will in turn teach others the key skill of literacy.
In mid 2023, DEVI Sansthan signed an MOU with the Uttar Pradesh department of secondary education to partner together on a literacy program. School students will use the Literacy Now App to teach illiterate neighbours, relatives and community members reading, writing and basic arithmetic.
DEVI Sansthan is working with IIMPACT in two districts of West Bengal since August 2022. In the first phase, 1000 women have been taught the key skills of literacy and health & hygiene awareness, with a particular focus on young mothers.
The project is developing reading, writing and financial literacy skills among illiterate women who are part of Self-Help Groups (SHGs) formed by HCL Foundation. A one-month pilot implementation of the program was successfully completed in January 2022 with 1500 learners, leading to plans for scaling the program up.
Since December 2018, DEVI Sansthan has been partnering with Sahbhagi Shiksha Kendra to enhance their adult literacy program in Sitapur district. 15 young, educated women are using the Global Dream toolkits to spread literacy. The target learners are primarily older women from SC and Muslim communities - a group with very low literacy rates.
The literacy program in Karauni village, on the outskirts of Lucknow, is a highly scalable community-based model. In 2015, 22 women were empowered with a literacy training, and went on to teach 180 women within the first few months. The impact has only escalated from there on, meaning that Kurauni is now almost fully literate.
DEVI Sansthan is helping the Mizoram government work towards universal literacy. After helping replicate the ALfA toolkits into Mizo, we conducted an online training for master-trainers. In the first phase, 5000 learners are being covered from 3 districts: Aizawl, Mamit and Lawngtlai. The Mizoram school education department is now expressing interest in using the ALfA program for young learners.
Starting in November 2018, DEVI Sansthan launched a partnership with Teach for India schools in Mumbai. We provided training and literacy toolkits to empower schools to ensure all children learn to read well, in Hindi, Marathi and English. Some of the children also took up the materials to teach their family and community members.
In August 2019, DEVI Sansthan began partnering with Magic Bus, which is setting up Community Learning Centres in a variety of rural and regional areas in states including Maharasthra, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana, as part of their ‘childhood to livelihood’ program. Among other activities, community learning centres are using DEVI’s literacy kits to help young people gain vital FLN skills.
Devi Sansthan has signed an MOU with Piramal Foundation to enhance Foundational Literacy and Numeracy of around 50 million children across 112 Aspirational districts covering 27 Indian states. This exciting partnership will address the massive learning gaps of primary government school children caused due to nearly two years of school closures due to COVID-19.
DEVI Sansthan volunteers helps people from slums make Aadhaar & PAN cards (basic ID), ration cards (subsidized food grain), bank accounts and pensions. One focus has been gas connections, as the fuel transition from wood to gas has huge health, environmental and economic benefits. Another initiative is helping differently abled people make their disability certificates and apply for pensions.
Often the poor are unable to access the healthcare they need, due to the complexity and expensiveness of the medical system. Tuberculosis is rampant in many slums - people are more at risk of catching TB due to overcrowded conditions, generally poor health and under-nutrition. We help by taking people to hospitals, buying medicines, and giving nutritional support to patients.
DEVI Sansthan is running holistic community empowerment programs in several urban poor communities in central Lucknow – the capital of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. DEVI’s slum community empowerment project is called MELA: Medical, Entitlements, Literacy Assistance. We help take people to hospital to receive proper treatment, and access their rights from the governments.
The City International School (CIS) Indira Nagar Campus hosts an afternoon shift school, as a service to the disadvantaged slum communities nearby. Both children and adults come to learn basic reading and writing, and women are also given vocational training. The CIS parents are invited to support a child, so that children from the financially weaker sections of our society can access a quality education.
With the ALfA toolkit you can teach someone to read in just 30 min per day x 30 days
Arabic
Bangla
Dhivehi
Dutch
English
Filipino
French
Mandarin
Nepali
Persian
Portuguese*
Serbian
Shona
Spanish
Swahili
Twi
Urdu
Yoruba
Somali*
Norwegian
* in development
Assamese
Bengali
Gujarati
Hindi
Kannada
Konkani*
Maithili
Marathi
Mizo
Odia
Punjabi
Tamil
Telugu
* in process
Sometimes we take literacy for granted, but can you imagine what it would be like to not be able to read and write? Literacy is vital for people's social, emotional, and economic wellbeing. Yet there are still hundreds of millions around the world ‐ especially in Low and Middle Income Countries, including India ‐ who lack the key skills of reading, writing and doing basic arithmetic.
That's why we developed the Accelerating Learning for All (ALfA) program, which enables learners to become literate and numerate in just 3-5 months, compared to the traditional 3-5 years. Using a known-to-unknown approach which bypasses the need to learn the alphabet, ALfA unlocks the power of paired learning to teach the key skills of reading, writing and arithmetic.
Explore this page to understand the scale of the literacy crisis and learn how the revolutionary ALfA program works.
Literacy is vital to socio-economic well-being, at multiple levels:
Read some of the stories of our learners to see what a difference literacy has made in their lives.
The ALfA program is more than just a set of books, it is a way of teaching. This groundbreaking pedagogy enables learners to become foundationally literate and numerate in just 45 days. It is based on three key principles:
When students sit in pairs, even the shiest one becomes an active learner. Paired learning is more enjoyable, leads to better learning outcomes.
ALfA flips the traditional ‘A for Apple’ on its head, moving from known (picture) to unknown (letter). Children read words from the first lesson, without wasting months on the alphabet.
Students make their own questions and ask each other, which engages them more deeply in the learning process and is crucial to developing 21st century skills.
ALfA seamlessly integrates the 5C Skills leading to 4C Traits of a twenty-first century learner. These 9Cs cannot be taught from a textbook, but rather acquired while working with each other in the classroom.
Watch this 10-minute explanation of ALfA and DEVI Sansthan's work.
Explore the ALfA materials in 30 languages.
Start teaching today with the Literacy Now app.
Your rupee goes a long way towards supporting the education of disadvantaged children.
Want to give someone the gift of a lifetime? Help a disadvantaged person learn to read using the free Literacy Now App.
Reach out to explore collaborations for literacy. Working together, we can make a big difference.
Dignity Education regularly conducts Massive Open Online Training workshops, empowering teachers from across India and around the world with the ALfA methodology. Training sessions included videos taking participants inside the ALfA classroom, exploration of the ALfA material, and practice of many hands-on activities.
Going inside real classrooms leads to practical understanding and immediate action
Participants use the chat and quizzes to interact with each other in real time sharing
Hundreds of thousands can participate at the same time
Participants can learn from the comfort of home
No need to travel around the world
No need for an expensive venue & equipment
Countries with representatives from all 6 continents have participated to date
People from almost all states of India have participated
Views on the YouTube training videos so far
Of participants said they would 'definitely' use ALfA in their class
of participants passed the quiz & were shared free access to ALfA materials
of teachers said they had new take-away points from the training
Wordsmith: Participants make as many words as they can using just a certain set of letters.
Number Whiz: Participants make as many words as they can using just a certain set of letters.
Children are learning with the known to unknown method, which is highly effective.
Greetings from Peru! ALfA will make a big difference here.
As well as making education interesting and joyful, children reading in pairs will be helpful in developing their character.
ALFA techniques of teaching is very interesting for students as well as teachers.
This is an excellent method, in which children collaborate to derive the first sound from the name of a picture.
All the children are learning with each other in pairs, which is remarkable in and of itself. They are learning maths through games. Amazing!
All children feel valued and important with paired learning. They also learn how to sit with each other as equals.
Children will enjoy learning to read with the ALfA books, because these books are pictorial.
Children are learning with each other in pairs, which is remarkable. Amazing!
Children are learning through games and they are also having fun.
Amazinggggg session....we learnt alot....
ALfA uses assessments which provides instant, detailed feedback that can inform and shape the learning process. Rather than traditional tests which stresses out students and overburdens teachers with marking, ALfA assessments are joyful and help guide learning.
Childern compete against themselves, striving for progress, rather than competing against each other.
Only factual recall, motivates 'mugging up'
Used to classify students into 'strong' & 'weak'
No constructive feedback - just a grade
Time-taking for teachers to mark
Tests higher-order thinking and problem-solving
Students ‘compete with themselves’ rather than each other
Students receive detailed feedback to inform further learning
Teacher burden is reduced through scanning software