LeapForWord
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Mission Statement
LeapForWord is a Mumbai based registered not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing specific English language skills amongst children from regional language communities so that they can access any opportunity commensurate with their capability & education which hitherto they were deprived of because of poor English skills.
About This Cause
Professional (Higher) Education in India is available only in English while 70% of our kids study in Government run FREE regional language schools. Most of these kids (despite being academically bright) cannot opt for professional courses because they are not confident of passing these English-only courses. The surest way of exiting the poverty trap is to avail education that lends jobs. But millions of our kids either drop-off or cannot avail such education which gives them jobs. Many of the rural kids come from agrarian families but the small piece of land with the increasing climate vagaries cannot sustain them any longer. So why is it that despite having schools for all, we have not been able to democratize English education? Why is it that 55% of our rural kids in grade 8 cannot read simple English sentences despite having English as a formal subject from grade 1? At LeapForWord, we spent close to 10 years staying amongst people we wish to service and realized that it might help our cause to go deeper than oft repeated problem of poor teachers. We believe that our government schooling system has some really committed teachers and if they too fail in delivering English, problem ought to be something deeper. Our grassroots work led us to pin the problem on the existing pedagogy - Current English teaching pedagogy solely depends on an English speaking teacher. If a teacher cannot speak English s/he cannot teach English. It is indeed very logical (that is how all languages are learnt) but not very practical in the communities where our teachers teach & stay because in these communities no-one speaks English. At LeapForWord, we have designed an alternate pedagogy to address this bottleneck of dependency on an English speaking teacher in every classroom. Rather than looking at English as a language, can we look at it as a subject like Maths, Science, History etc...which are across the world taught in the local language? We developed a Translation algorithm that translates English into any Sanskrit based language (>20 major languages originate from Sanskrit). On top of this we developed a structured product called The English Literacy Program. This 5-level modular & measurable program is designed keeping in mind the teacher so that s/he is enabled to teach the kids develop Reading, Comprehension & Sentence Structuring capabilities. The USP however is that the teacher can teach this program in the LOCAL LANGUAGE and is no longer expected to be a fluent speaker. By making English teaching independent of English speaking we believe that every willing teacher in any part is now capable of effectively developing specific English capabilities in the students. Till date we have reached out to 20,000+ students through 2,000+ teachers. Our intention is by 2022 make this solution available to 1million regional language school teachers who in turn control the professional fate of >30 million kids. To achieve this goal, we have digitized our content in partnership with the organisation that rolled out the biggest consumer-tech solution in the world in the form of Aadhar Card (India's Social Security Identity).