ActionAid begins community literacy project

ActionAid Ghana (AAG), a human rights advocacy non-governmental organization operating in the country, has started a new project on Complementary Basic Education (CBE) to make out of school children to access standardized nine months functional literacy education.

The pilot project, which is community owned, is to reach 120,000 children in the Nanumba North District in the Northern Region, Tain, Atebubu and Banda ristricts in the Brong- Ahafo Region to ensure that children who dropped out of school are supported to enter the formal school.

Mr Alhassan Sulemana, CBE Project Manager of ActionAid Ghana, said this in Tamale on Monday during the closing ceremony of a 15-day training for 32 facilitators in the Northern Region.

A total of 92 facilitators would teach in 61 communities with 92 classes during the one year pilot project. Likpakpaaln, Dagbani and Twi would be the common languages to be used for the classes with the conviction that the mother tongue was the best tool for teaching beginners.

The project is being funded by the Department for International Development (DFID) at the cost of £120,000 with the collaboration of the Ministry of Education.

Mr Sulemana said the project was intended to create an opportunity for the facilitators to study while teaching so that at the end, they could also proceed with their education to tertiary level adding that “You must not see this as a permanent job”.

Madam Esther Boateng, AAG Northern Regional Manager, said the CBE was among the numerous educational projects it had implemented and that its contribution in educational infrastructure and service delivery in the country could not be over emphasized.

She said the NGO was motivated to get all children out of school to go back to school since education was the only tool they could use to overcome the endemic poverty in most of the rural communities and advised community members to take advantage of the project to get their children back in school.

Mr Musah Salifu, the course prefect for the facilitators, stated that the project would be beneficial to many school dropouts and that each of the facilitators had been given teaching aids.

Source: GNA