Recognizing a good pre-primary school as the foundation of a child’s education, the Karnataka Catalytic Programme has started balwadis or children’s centres for children between three and five years. Volunteers run these schools and are trained as entrepreneurs to take up the challenge of preparing a child for school. They charge a small service fee for the facilities they provide in their homes. Volunteers also manage the libraries that Akshara has set up for children between six and eighteen years. Each library has more than fifty books.

Schools here are besieged by consistently low achievement standards. Children are poor learners, primarily because they do not know how to read. Akshara started its Accelerated Programme for Reading in schools. Its reading programme has generated interest among children, and teachers call it “new” and “exciting.”

The progress the programme has witnessed in its brief span is spectacular. It reaches 402 villages in 20 blocks, 33,478 children in all. 307 children’s centres cover 6117 children.11, 792 children are in the reading programme conducted in 348 schools. 3509 out-of-school children have been covered through village learning centres, run by volunteers.

Akshara has enlisted the support of well-established local institutions with strong credentials in the community to implement the Karnataka Catalytic Programme. Its partners are non-governmental organizations, self-help groups and community-based organizations that have built excellent institutional structures. Akshara has added education, a new entrant, to their agenda of work and is focusing on building capacity in these organizations to handle this well. The intention is to make the programme a self-sustaining model.

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