Adult & Family Literacy in Liberia 2024 -2025

Introduction

 As Liberia struggles to improve its literacy rate and reduce overage enrolment in early childhood education, the program “Family Literacy Initiative" is making key attempts in helping government efforts.

WE-CARE Foundation and her partners Friends of Liberia, HIPPY International, and Comic Relief US implementing the Family Literacy Initiative (FLI) program in its ninth year continues to prepare parents with the skills, tools, and confidence to teach their children ages 3 -5 years old, for school readiness and success in school. The program is working in four urban communities and one rural community (Caldwell, WestPoint, Neezoe, Duazon and Nyemah Town) in Liberia. All these communities possess similar characteristics to include slum, low income and low literacy.

There are 237 families with 238 children (121 girls, 117 boys) ages 3 -5 which are divided into three different levels as year 1, 2 and 3. Year one has 43 families, year two has 101 families and year three has 94 families. These families are receiving weekly training and teaching and learning materials from trained Home Visitors living in the communities. Teaching and learning materials to cover the curriculum content for 1-18 weeks were distributed to the 237 families.

There are 105 (96 females and 9 males) parents out of the 237 families that are provided with adult literacy classes to improve their literacy skills to better teach their children. The children of the parents that are participating in the adult literacy classes pullout pages from the activity booklets and responses during weekly reviews by home visitors are showing improvement in finished work and their interactions with others. One mother said “I did not know how to read and write so I role play and taught my children by picture reading. I could not teach my child how to write. Now, I am attending the adult literacy class; this is my second year, and I can read the FLI books and write. So, my child can also write the alphabets and her name.” There are many of FLI parents with similar stories.

In order to measure evidence of the increase in school readiness of the children and improve literacy skills of parents, pre assessments were administered to 43 first year children (24 boys, 19 girls). All the program’s first-year children are three years old. The results of the assessment showed that based on their ages they are delayed in school readiness skills. However, based on evidence from previous years of intervention, these children will be on track with school readiness skills before they complete the program cycle of three years.

We are happy to report that the two early childhood development (ECD) centers constructed by self-help from community dwellers in two of the towns that have no school within 45 minutes walking distance to the nearest school had their first kindergarten graduation in July 2024. The two rural towns are participating in FLI under the rural community Nyemah Town:

 Marchee Town ECD Center

This ECD center started with 49 students from September 2023-June 2024 and ended the academic year with 46 students. Out of the 46 students 18 graduated from the kindergarten (6 boys, 12 girls). Out of the 18 graduates 10 are FLI program participants (6 girls, 4 boys). The FLI children graduated from kindergarten at the right age. Without the program’s intervention in this town, these children would not have had the opportunity to gain early childhood education at the appropriate age.                                              

Gankalashue ECD Center

This ECD center started with 49 students from September 2023-June 2024 and ended the year with 29 students. Out of the 29 students 13 graduated from the kindergarten (5 boys, 8 girls). Out of the 13 graduates 8 are FLI program participants (4 girls, 4 boys).

This center experienced the highest dropout during the school year due to some of these reasons:

• No feeding program
• Extreme poverty
• Very low literacy rates (acceptance)

The ECD centers ran three classes: nursery (age 3), pre-kindergarten (age 4) and kindergarten (age 5). However, due to the ECD centers being the only learning centers in the towns, there are overage children enrolled at the ECD centers. Currently, FLI Home Visitors serve as the ECD teachers.

 The challenge is how do these children continue their education in the absent of grade one in the towns. We are engaging the Ministry of Education to assign a grade one teacher at the Marchee Town school for the academic 2024/25 year. A trained teacher is pay US$100.00 to USD$150.00 per month in Liberia.

 WE-CARE Foundation, Friends of Liberia, HIPPY International and all the families that are participating in the Family Literacy Initiative program would like to extend their thanks and appreciation to all the contributors. Your donations are helping a parent and child become literate and prepared for school.

Links:

• http://www.FOL.org