Kilibe Icon Foundation

EDUCATION CHALLENGES IN YUMBE UGANDA

Over the last two decades the world has enrolled millions of previously out-of-school children in primary school. But attendance has not improved learning outcomes. In many resource-limited countries over 50% of Grade 2 students are unable to read a single word of a short text or perform two-digit subtraction. Why does this happen? Structural inefficiencies in education systems are at the root of the problem. School systems are not well designed to address the needs of students who may be the first in their families to attend school or who enter the school system without having gained early-learning skills during early childhood. Additionally, children are grouped according to age, and often move to new grades regardless of learning level. Teachers often use a prescribed curriculum which frequently disfavors students who are not yet at that learning level, and they fall further behind. Children who miss key concepts in the early grades often never have a chance to catch up, no matter how many years they spend in school. As a result, investments made by governments, communities, and parents in order to get children into schools will go to waste for millions of students.

The Proven Intervention

Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) was developed by Pratham in the early 2000s to respond to the failures of the education system. At the classroom level, TaRL is a teaching approach that assesses children using a simple testing tool and then groups them according to their learning level rather than their age or grade. For a period of the day, children in middle-upper primary focus on foundational skills through appropriate activities and materials. What happens in the classroom is enabled through a few key defining components of TaRL including, strong mentoring and monitoring by leaders of practice who have experience conducting the TaRL in the classroom, simple assessment data that is used to inform action at all levels of the education system, and a classroom methodology that is designed to accelerate children’s acquisition of reading and Math skills in the middle to upper primary. Pratham has partnered with Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) affiliated professors for over 15 years to evaluate, adapt, and develop the TaRL approach for scale in India. Six randomized evaluations in seven states of India indicate that when TaRL is well implemented, learning outcomes improve.

There are currently TaRL programs in over 15 countries in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. TaRL Africa, which began in 2018 as a joint venture between Pratham and J-PAL, is now an organization with a regional office in Nairobi, and country teams in Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and Zambia, supports governments and partners to pilot and scale-up TaRL programs in Sub- Saharan Africa. Pratham continues to scale up TaRL in India and supports partners across the globe to do the same. However, with more organizations implementing the approach fewer children will fall behind.

Kilibe Icon Foundation Having seen many Children Getting out of school and those in schools are un able to read and write, Kilibe Icon has taken a move to adopt some of the proven actions to improve Childs learning both in and Out of School

We are therefore seeking more funding to provide more materials and human support to facilitate our project in order to increase literacy rate in Yumbe.