Mr. Victor Lyons

Inventor of Tara Akshar, Development Alternatives


United Kingdom

Victor Lyons is an expert in PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). His experience with crime victims and war/terrorism victims led him to set up groundbreaking delivery units for PTSD sufferers in the UK and in the USA which have trained hundreds of therapists and changed the lives of thousands of clients. He arrived in India in 2002 to set up health education programs to address rural morbidity rates. But faced with the seemingly insurmountable barrier of illiteracy in his target audience of rural women, he and his team spent two years developing the Tara Akshar literacy program. He has since gone on to develop an English literacy program (called ReadingWise English) for schoolchildren in the UK which addresses the needs of learning disabled children and children from non-English speaking immigrant families. The program has been thoroughly validated in an independent randomized control trial. Since then, he has produced a new English literacy AND talking/listening program for South Asia called LearningWise, which is now being implemented in Sri Lanka and India.