ALEF's Founder
Hélène Boëthius
Throughout her working life, Hélène’s vision has been to enable people to lift themselves out of poverty and social exclusion through their own efforts by using reading, writing and numeracy.
When she founded ALEF in 2010, she had many years of experience in literacy and adult education in development work. From 1980 to 1995, she worked for SIL International in Togo. Together with her Togolese colleagues, Hélène built an adult education programme in the Ifè language based on the Gudschinsky method. The programme is now run by the Togolese organisation ACATBLI, which now uses the ALEF method exclusively in its courses.
Hélène’s academic background is in linguistics, translation and theology. The linguistic perspective has been important in developing the ALEF method. Through her work with SIL, she also developed a passion for giving people the opportunity to use their own mother tongue in writing.
Between 2000 and 2008, Hélène worked for organisations including Läkarmissionen and PMU. Both roles focused on literacy. There, she also learned how international development aid works. She visited many projects, took part in developing methods and teaching materials, carried out evaluations and taught courses.
During this time, an idea began to take shape for an entirely new method of educating illiterate adults living in poverty – a method based on conversations and texts about people’s everyday lives. At the same time, Hélène saw the need for a development organisation specialising in supporting this method by providing expertise and training and helping projects deliver courses. In 2010, she founded ALEF.
During ALEF’s first five years, Hélène worked without a salary so that most of the funds received could be used in the projects. She undertook all visits to partner countries and conducted all the seminars to develop teaching materials for the first projects in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Togo on her own, as a volunteer. It was through this process that the ALEF method took concrete shape.
When Hélène returned to the projects and heard people’s accounts of how they had changed their lives, she received a reward that meant more than any financial compensation: confirmation that the method works and that people can use it to change their circumstances.
After stepping down as Secretary General in August 2024, Hélène wrote the book Empowerment Through Literacy and Dialogue – The ALEF Approach to Adult Education in Development, which describes the ALEF method and its application. The book is available to download here.
Read more about ALEF’s history on the page What is ALEF? under the heading “History”.
Hélène can be contacted at helene.boethius@proton.me.