Leap for Word

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Leap for Word

Leap for Word (LFW) is dedicated to improving the English skills of students from regional language government schools.

Founded in 2009 in Mumbai, Maharashtra, LFW is dedicated to improving the English levels of students from regional language government schools so that they can have professional educational opportunities. LFW operates in a predominantly digital mode where the local government school teachers are trained to be more effective in teaching English to the students.

Over the years, LFW has improved their model to disseminate English Teaching Techniques and scale its adoption at a scale that would affect the literacy levels of an entire state. Their preferred mode for this adoption has been voluntary i.e. teachers themselves are given the right to choose whether they wish to teach using LFW techniques.

www.leapforword.org

Focus Areas :

Introduce English literacy to students in local language government schools through capacity building of teachers.

Location: Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Tamilnadu

Project status: Active

Project lead: Kshitij Neroorkar

Objectives

The overall objective of LFW is to enable the teachers with skills to train their students from zero English literacy to sustaining English literacy where the students can read, write, comprehend and structure grammatically correct sentences. This can be achieved by doing one or more of the following:

To reach out to teachers of regional language medium schools and introduce them to the techniques that make up the English Literacy Program.

To provide structured year-long online support to those teachers that enroll in the program

To enable the teachers to reach out to their students parents to restore their faith in government schools.

Problem

Out of the 200 million school children in India, 140 million (75%) study in regional language government schools, where there is a lack of English language trained teachers. The lack of English proficiency puts these children at a disadvantage for higher education (such as professional degrees in sciences, arts, etc.), since they are offered in English.

Solution

Providing digital training sessions to teachers on English language concepts using regional language such as Marathi, Telugu, Kannada, etc. This will in turn enable the skilled teachers to transfer the acquired English language knowledge to their students.

Vibha-LFW Partnership

In 2019, Vibha started financial support to LFW

As a supporting partner, Vibha provides guidance to scale up their model to other Indian states, helps develop creative ideas for improvement of the program, capacity building of staff, effective partnership with government and organizational level support.

In 2019-2020, Vibha funded Rs. 35,00,000 to enable LFW for 50,000 students in 4 districts of Maharashtra namely Ahmednagar, Nasik, Satara and Solapur.

With subsequent funding, expanded LFW outreach to Andhra Pradesh (Paderu region), Jharkhand (Pakur district), Tamilnadu (Thiruvallur)

Project Partners’ voice:

In the words of Pranil Naik, Founder of LFW:

“This is the second year of our support by Vibha. It has been a very exciting and meaningful engagement thus far for the following reasons:
1. In the social sector, NGOs are supposed to be passionate while funders are supposed to fund that passion. However Vibha is different. All their representatives be it staff or volunteers are extremely passionate about their work. This is rare.
2. In the social sector, donors usually have an upper hand and in many cases they throw their weight around creating a relationship of superior & subordinate. But Vibha is unlike this. They don’t act like people with more power rather as equals in the relationship. It is a joy to work with such a funder as they are humble and attend to conversations with the desire to learn.”