The Eureka Children’s Library program currently reaches over 120,000 children in 2300 villages across 17 districts of Tamilnadu. The program is implemented by a network of 60 NGOs working under the leadership of AID INDIA.

Most children in villages have no access to educational materials and books. Children can neither access books at home nor at school. Most villages have no running libraries. School textbooks are the only books that many children have ever laid hands on. It is no surprise in this context that 65% children in 3rd-5th std in schools cannot read a paragraph in Tamil (their first language)!

Access to attractive good quality educational materials (and books) is the first step to getting children to read. Attractive books makes children see what is there to read – makes them want to read. To encourage reading habit in primary school children and to ensure all children get access to quality books, we started the Eureka Children’s Library Program.

In each village, a local volunteer maintains the library (a big bag with a bunch of books) at her home. She gets about 50 kids in village together every evening and circulates the story cards and books to the children. The materials have been selected very carefully so that the books and cards themselves generate a lot of excitement. We have a large collection of very short 1-page colorful story cards that are very easy to read. Children who find reading difficult start with these simple graded cards. Then they quickly move on to more complex cards and books. We have also provided each library with a set of Tulika Books – the colorful and funny stories also attracts children to the libraries.

Apart from reading and circulating the library books, the volunteer also regularly organizes a lot of activities for children – magic shows, games, art, origami, toy making, etc. Each library has a Children’s Club that meets every week – this makes the library an active learning center. The library also identifies children’s talents – drawing, craft, science, math, sports – and trains them on it. To expose children to different environments, we are also trying to get volunteers in Chennai to take the library kids on tours and host them for 1-2 days.

Apart from activities in the village, we also organize district and state wide activities. Last year we had organized a state wide story writing competition in which 15000 children wrote stories.

The Eureka Children’s Libraries form the backbone on which we are building several community learning initiatives – ensuring that every child in the state gets quality education. There is a lot of demand to both start more libraries as well as to increase the number of books in each of the libraries. We are looking for support to expand the libraries from the current 2300 villages to 3500 villages as well as to add many more high quality books in each of the existing libraries.