Selection of Effective Adult Literacy and Numeracy Programmes

Ghana

Education Quality for All (EQUALL)

Country Profile

Population: 20 669 000 (2005)
Population living on less than 2 US$ a day: 78.5 % (2007)
Adult literacy rate: 58 % (2007)

Context

Ghana’s Strategic Plan for Education states that all children should be enrolled in school by 2015. Moreover, all those who leave basic education should be functionally literate and numerate. Yet just 52% of the school-age population currently reach the sixth grade. Of those who complete their primary education, only 23% achieve proficiency in English, the official language of Ghana and the main language in education. The northern region of the country has the lowest rate of school completion and student performance, with a literacy rate as low as 5% and 40% of school-age children out of school.

Most Ghanaians have one of the 63 local languages as their mother tongue. The new education reform states that, where feasible, schools should use the mother tongue for the acquisition of literacy and as a medium of instruction in classes one to three. However, programmatically, there is very little in place to support this, due to a lack of effective literacy instruction both in the Ghanaian languages and in English.

Programme

Education Quality for All (EQUALL) is a five-year (2004-2009) USAID funded project. It is designed to support literacy programmes and help the Ministry of Education and Sports and the Ghana Education Service in its fight against illiteracy. Some of the programme’s main aims are to:

increase access to basic education for children, especially girls, who have not had the opportunity to attend school;
improve reading instructional practices; and
improve education management practices.

EQUALL currently supports two government programmes: a) The Complementary Education Programme (CEP) and b) the Reading Improvement in Primary Education Programme (RIPE).

a): The Complementary Education Programme (CEP), initiated in 1985, was designed for children who do not enrol in or complete school due to poverty and/or the need to work on farms or in the home. It is a non-formal education programme for children aged eight to fourteen, providing local language and English instruction to prepare pupils to enter the fourth grade of the formal educational system.

Teachers work on a voluntary basis, and their selection is organized locally. These volunteers receive 21 days of initial training and two follow up training courses at intervals of two to three months. They receive less than US$ 10 per month as so called “soap money” for three hours of teaching a day. In some cases teachers also volunteer to give extra classes in the afternoons. The learners go through nine months of schooling in their local language. Currently, there are learning materials in four languages that could easily be translated into other local languages. CEP uses a learner-centred and participatory approach that draws upon the creativity of the volunteer instructors. Teachers from the formal system who volunteer for the CEP have drawn on these methods for their classes, and there have been efforts at a national level to mainstream the methodology into the system.

The CEP programme has partnered with the successful School for Life programme, which has been supported by the Danish Cooperation since 1985. It uses the same materials as School for Life, with an additional two months of English after the nine months of local language instruction are over. This prepares children for entry into formal schools, where English is mostly used as the medium of instruction. The programme materials consist of teacher guides for the local language and English, and textbooks for the learners. Teachers are taught to produce educational materials, such as flash cards and visual aids, from local materials. There is a strong emphasis on children developing skills in local crafts, in addition to their language and numeracy skills. About 15,000 children currently benefit from this programme.

While there is great demand for this programme, it faces several major challenges. Because volunteers are not paid salaries, yet invest a large proportion of their time in the programme, there is pressure to provide them with appropriate remuneration for their efforts. The programme’s strategy, however, is to create more community support to cover farming and family responsibilities, especially when the teachers are attending training courses. It has also proven challenging to recruit girls as volunteer teachers due to the conservative gender roles. This issue has been addressed by developing community awareness, and currently 28% of volunteers are female (compared to 10% initially).

Thus far, no formal evaluation of the CEP programme has been carried out. However, learning outcomes reflected by official test scores show that children who have gone through the CEP programme perform substantially better than children who have gone through the formal system. Furthermore, a Criterion Reference Test is run on a 10% national sample of sixth grade students each year. The results show that 90% of children in the formal system fail to achieve the minimum level of reading skills, compared to School for Life pupils who are able to read and understand information in their own language. The programme is also reported to have contributed to an increase in national enrolment rates. While 59.4% of children complete the third grade in the northern region, 91% of School for Life children complete the equivalent nine-month programme. The cost per pupil with School for Life is substantially lower than formal schooling, resulting in very high cost-effectiveness.
b): The Reading Improvement in Primary Education (RIPE) programme works to improve the quality of teaching and learning in formal primary schools. This programme was developed in 2004 as part of EQUALL to address the low levels of learning in primary school. Poor performance could usually be attributed to a lack of commitment on the part of policy-makers and the general public towards prioritising reading fluency and comprehension in the local language as a bridge to literacy in English. Unfortunately, some problems have been caused by policy shifts that have left teachers and the general public confused about the language used in schools. As a result, while the local language should be the medium of instruction in the first three grades, there has been no programme supporting to support this. The consequence is that pupils are failing to acquire literacy either in their own language or in English.

EQUALL currently supports 12 school districts (of a total 138) and 685 schools by means of a programme that was adapted from the South African Breakthrough to Literacy/Bridge to English (BTL/BTE) programme. This uses a scripted teacher guide that helps ensure that tasks are completed on time and compensates for less competent teachers. The teachers follow the guides orienting them towards active, child-centred approaches such as group work, interactive reading and sentence building. Grade one materials are available in five Ghanaian languages, and include children’s textbooks, storybook readers, conversation posters and sentence makers. At the end of grade one, children begin developing their spoken English skills, before moving on to work on English literacy competencies in second grade. By the end of grade three, children should be competent in reading, writing, and speaking both their local language and English. EQUALL does not work directly with the teachers, but trains District Trainers and Circuit Supervisors who, in turn, are responsible for teachers’ training and support.

While the programme has succeeded in developing L1 and L2 (local language and English) literacy skills, it simultaneously poses a number of major challenges. The highly prescriptive nature of the materials leaves very little room for teacher innovation. Teachers often complain that the methodology demands too much of them. In many cases, trainers and supervisors are either unable or unwilling to provide the support needed by the teachers. Furthermore, because of copyright issues over the BTL/BTE programme, it is difficult to expand the initiative nationally. This has led government bodies to develop their own literacy programme for bridging from local languages to English. EQUALL will support the development of this national literacy programme from 2007-2009. After that, Ghana is expected to be able to provide all children with the opportunity to learn to read and write in their local language and subsequently acquire literacy in English.

Ghana

Education Quality for All (EQUALL)

Country Profile

Context

Programme

Lessons learned

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