November 2005

Ghana’s National School Improvement Plan Targets Local Literacy

An audiovisual tour

In many communities across Ghana, local leaders, parents, and other citizens are coming together to recreate their own schools. Working from the ground up, community groups participate in every aspect of school decision-making, from identifying the learning needs of their children, to constructing a space to hold classes, to recruiting, training, and compensating teachers.

This grassroots effort is just one facet of a nationwide program to radically improve teaching and learning throughout Ghana. Known as Education Quality for All (EQUALL), the comprehensive project is part of the Ghanaian government’s ten-year strategic education plan. It is directed by EDC in collaboration with international and Ghanaian partners and funded by the United States Agency for International Development.

“We are coming at educational improvement from all angles, addressing management, policymakers, teachers, out-of-school youth, informal schools, and special education,” says project manager Kay Lehrer. “There are many pieces to this project, but we tie it all together with a tight focus on literacy. Reading has been identified as the critical issue to education quality in Ghana.”

The urgent attention to literacy is well founded: Currently only ten percent of Ghanaian students can read at grade level after six years of primary school. The program aims to improve school participation and instruction by introducing management reforms, improved teacher training, and more effective instructional methods.

One particularly promising method of literacy instruction that the program will bring to Ghanaian schools is “mother tongue literacy.” As its name suggests, the method begins by teaching children to read and write in their local language before introducing English instruction, Ghana’s official language. Because schools in Ghana have traditionally taught only English, mother tongue literacy is controversial in many sectors of the country, particularly among parents who are themselves illiterate. “Parents tend to measure their children’s success by whether they speak English, so our approach is counter-intuitive to them,” says Lehrer. “Yet you can imagine the challenge a child faces in learning to read a language that she doesn’t speak or understand. We need to demonstrate to parents and policymakers that children will master English better if they start with their own language.”

Mother tongue literacy has proven effective in many other countries in Africa, and Lehrer and her colleagues believe it is critical to educational improvement in Ghana as well. Over the course of the five-year project, 20 school districts and 9 informal programs, roughly 10 percent of the primary school population, will initiate mother tongue literacy programs. “We see this as a large demonstration project to prove the value of local language literacy,” says Lehrer. “We hope the success of the program will allow us to influence education policy in that direction more broadly across the country.”

Ultimately, EQUALL is working at many levels to decentralize Ghana’s school system so that local communities have greater control over and a larger stake in the success of their schools. By its conclusion, the project aims to make Ghana’s school system more effective and student oriented, and to develop a culture of reading among young people in a country where literacy and print materials are highly valued.

Click here to view the audiovisual tour

[Note: the audiovisual tour is a multimedia file that may take a few minutes to load, depending on the speed of your computer and your connection to the Internet. Once loaded, the running time is 3:00 minutes].

Music for the audiovisual tour courtesy of Robert Levin, www.kgsf.org

For more information about EQUALL please contact:

Kingsley Arkorful, arkorful@equall.com
Kay Leherr, leherr@equall.com

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©2005 Education Development Center, Inc. All Rights Reserved.