Enabling women from marginalised communities to access opportunities for empowering literacy has been a critical part of Nirantar's mandate. Currently, Nirantar is responding to a renewed interest in women's literacy from different quarters - NGOs, women's organizations and the government. There has been a growing realisation that literacy is essential for building women's leadership and for strengthening grassroots women's organizations. There has also been an increasing demand for literacy in Self-Help Groups , Panchayats and federations.

There is a paucity of capacity building opportunities, and literacy material [Link to creating educational material>teaching learning material>literacy and continuing education) from an empowerment perspective. In this context, Nirantar offers structured intensive inputs over a period of 18 months to selected partner organisations who wish to start literacy programmes.

This entails:

a presentation on contextualised teaching-learning by the SSK team
• Enabling organisations to visualise and design contextualised, theme-based and sustainable literacy programmes
• Building perspectives related to literacy - especially linkages between women's literacy and empowerment
• Training staff members of the organisations in literacy and numeracy pedagogy based on feminist adult learner-centred principles
• Enabling organisations to conduct teachers trainings
• Enabling organisations to develop indicators and frameworks for monitoring and evaluation
• Providing numeracy and theme-based literacy primers and post-literacy material as well as enabling organisations to develop their own teaching learning material
• Field exposure to Nirantar's literacy programme in Lalitur
• Follow up visits to partner organisations to provide support, facilitate reflection and future planning
• Collective, mutual learning processes between partner organisations facilitated by Nirantar At present, Nirantar is providing intensive inputs to Parmarth (UP), Vanangana (UP), IPTADA (Rajasthan), Mahila Samakhya (Chhatisgarh)

Nirantar is also providing technical support to PRADAN, a premier national non-government organization working on livelihoods with poor communities. PRADAN has recently launched a programme for women's literacy in three blocks of Purulia district of West Bengal, which is expected to directly benefit 3,200 women in some of the most backward blocks of Purulia district. Nirantar has been involved in providing support at each stage of the programme, from design and implementation to evaluation.

click to read reports:
Literacy Training: Programme Design and Implementation
Training for thematic literacy