Crash Literacy Camps

CRASH LITERACY CAMPS FOR POTENTIAL ADIVASI WOMEN LEADERS

This was the first experience of Laya in undertaking a ten-day crash literacy programme with potential adivasi women in the adivasi region of North Andhra.

The main objective of this effort was to reach out to adivasi women learners and equip them with basic literacy skills, especially their ability to read in Telugu and numeracy skills in order to facilitate their effective functioning as leaders at the grassroots’ level.

As the women can speak the language fluently we felt that there must be a way by which their literary skills could be developed quickly rather than in a long-term accompaniment process as in traditional adult literacy classes. The idea of this possibility emerged during a chance interaction with representatives of Astha, Rajasthan and Nirantar, New Delhi at a workshop organized by ASPBAE on Indigenous Education. Both these organisations have attempted this approach to literacy and were successful. However the medium of literacy for both these organisations was Hindi. Hence we began to look for a resource organisation in Andhra Pradesh. Andhra Pradesh Mahila Samatha Society (APMSS) was suggested to us by Nirantar, an organisation with a considerable experience in literacy. Our attempts to interact with APMSS failed. Hence we decided to start from scratch and consider this initiative as a meaningful challenge.

We generated local material and worked out a methodology suitable for a ten day period. Initially in house there was scepticism about the efficacy of this venture but in time this scepticism has given way to enthusiasm especially among the adivasi trainers.

The participants came from three adivasi districts of Andhra Pradesh. They belong to various tribes. A large number of them were Konda Reddy. The age levels were mainly between 20-40 years. This age group has a very large number of illiterates according to our experience because a decade ago the access to formal education in adivasi areas was very limited. Quite a large proportion of the women in this age group have had some exposure to literacy, usually of an informal nature: through their children or through having participated and dropped out of non-formal education attempts made earlier by the government or voluntary agencies in the region. This has helped to achieve positive results. By the end of the period about 30% can read and write words, another 30% can read simple sentences and the remaining are able to read stories. In the case of numeracy skills the women are helped to read and write numbers, do simple calculations and read time.