The level of disruption created by covid-19 on education is unprecedented than in the last 100 years. This has undoubtedly created a huge literacy gap in pupil’s lives. The impact of covid is even felt in the economies and education of most developed countries let alone a developing country like Ghana where access to resources is a huge challenge and the few that are in supply is very scarce to acquire. As an organization that thrived and operated in the mid of covid-19, we are happy to have the Lexplore kits that supported us with the assessment of pupil’s literacy needs (levels) and provided us with the right interventions to helped bridge the gap within these excruciating times. We operated on a simple principle that ‘with access to literacy tools in the mid of the pandemic, every child has the capacity to read independently’.
The good about our story in the year 2020 is that, we trained very few educators with a skills to teach literacy and also to manage our literacy clubs and the impact was highly phenomenal since the challenges identified with the help of the device from the start could now be translated to reading short stories at the end of the project for the year 2020. We have seen the need to expand our program given the negative effect of this pandemic on pupils literacy and coupled with a recent report by the Ghana National Association of Teacher (GNAT) aired by Joy News titled ‘Inability to read at Grade 2 is disheartening – GNAT’. Children’s inability to read basic words at Grade Two is disheartening, Palham Oyiye, the National Coordinator, Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), said in Accra on Tuesday 8 September 2020, 8:42pm.
At a conference organized by the Ghana Publishers Association to celebrate the 2020 “World Literacy Day,” he said some children were unable to read simple words like ‘the’ and ‘cat’.
The Conference was on the theme: “Child Literacy as Foundation for Future Development: Strategies in the Covid-19 Crisis and beyond”.
Mr. Oyiye said a World Bank Ghana Accountability for Learning Outcomes Project revealed that the Early Grade Reading Assessment did not change between 2013 and 2015.
We are committed to open up on accommodating of ten clubs from different schools in the coming year 2021 to help close the gap of literacy in rural communities of Tamale South constituencies and Nantong district respectively