Nothing impacts children’s learning more than the quality of teaching. In Sierra Leone, a west African country that has been ravaged by civil war and Ebola, a lot of hope is being placed in the education system. Yet, less than half of primary school teachers have any formal teaching qualifications. At CODE, we want to help change that by offering scholarships to motivated young women who aspire to positively impact children’s lives as teachers. We’re a Canadian international development charity focused uniquely on promoting quality education and literacy. For the last 60 years we’ve been working towards a vision of a world where every child can realize their potential as literate, empowered and self-reliant citizens. Listen to learn more about education in Sierra Leone and how you can help.
Our host Emily Prashad interviews Dr. Johanna Kuyvenhoven who is a reading specialist and the lead at CODE in Sierra Leone.
For all the information on the scholarship program please visit our website.
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We are located at 321 Chapel Street Ottawa, ON, Canada K1N 7Z2. 1-800-661-2633. info@code.ngo
Welcome. My name is Emily Prashad and I'm the Communications Manager at Code. I'm a trained journalist and an adventure seeker, but the show's not about me. It's about students, teachers and creating lifelong learners. I will act as your guide today, as we learn more about CODE's work in Sierra Leone.
We are recording in Canada's capital, Ottawa, Ontario on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin. Anishinaabe people. The thing you are all probably wondering is who is CODE and what do we do? We are a Canadian international development, charity focused, uniquely on promoting quality education and literacy.
For the last 60 years, we've been working towards a vision of a world where every child can realize their potential as a illiterate, empowered and self-reliant citizen. The majority of our work is focused in Sub-Saharan Africa. When you read and write, you can do anything and be anything. And that is the simple, yet powerful idea behind what we do and why we do it.
I would now like to introduce our special guest for today's show Dr. Johanna Kuyvenhoven. Welcome. We're delighted to have you.
Well, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here with you.
Why don't you introduce yourself and tell us what you do at CODE and how you ended up in Sierra Leone?
Basically, I'm what's called a reading specialist. That's my particular area of study and teaching is working with teachers and children who learn in conditions as we find them in Sierra Leone. I live and work full time in Sierra Leone. I'm working for and with CODE. We have an office in Sierra Leone because we find ourselves in demand and doing so much programming in that country.
Why Sierra Leone? That's a really long story. In my younger years, I was part of a CUSO peace corps type of community project. And in that project, we lived in a village for four years. I learned the local language and I had a child there, my third child. Such events bring people very close together. After four years, I moved away, but after the brutal 11 years' war in Sierra Leone, I returned to see who had survived and how my neighbors would be able to live.
It was a sobering two months visit my friend Conde was walking through the destroyed village and brought me to one, the only one, a new building. I asked him, what is it? What are you showing me? And he said, “Yo, Anna . He said, Joe, this is a school. If we had good education, we wouldn't have had this war.”
It was actually at that moment that I committed to working to support education in Sierra Leone. But I didn't want to work on a model that creates a kind of Island of privilege or one good school in the country or district. My own education experiences led me to work for a wider view. And so since that time I've been busy with research, working in very close collaboration with my colleagues and fellow educators in Sierra Leone, and always connecting up with the ministry of education and working to align whatever I was doing with practices in the country.
I'm not advertising for CODE, but I will tell you that I really believe in the approach that we take to reading that. Unless you have something that you want to read and love to read. Reading is a pretty flat experience. So CODE works on developing literature that children would love to engage with and discover that when you open up a book, you open up worlds of experience and people and so on.
So that is the foundation of literacy programming that's strong and good.
I think most of our listeners can picture a standard North American classroom full of colorful books and activity stations, et cetera. But I really want to know what a typical classroom in Sierra Leone looks like. Can you take us there if we all close our eyes?
Well, first of all, you have to recognize you have to take a great big giant step because the gap is so vast. At the same time, it's hard to make a generalization about what a typical Sierra Leonean classroom looks like. In cities and larger towns, you'll find a large, long concrete structure. There will be a host of desks jammed together in the classroom because most classrooms are overcrowded. I've been in classrooms that had as many as 80 to 100 Grade, One and Two children jammed together. Very few visual aids, a blackboard. But you will rarely find electricity, running water, flush toilets, and so on. Those are rare.
And if you step out, you travel into villages and even on the outsides of some towns, you'll find less predictability about the structure of furnishings. You will find mud brick. Sometimes you will find no walls at all. There will be a thatched roof and a blackboard that's carried in by the teacher.
So there's diversity, but I would say that on the whole, when we look at the classrooms, we will find that there are very few visual resources. You will not find libraries. You will not find electricity or running water in the vast majority of classrooms, and you will find minimal materials available. And it adds up to a situation in which learning to read is highly challenged.
Further challenged by statistics that show us that well over half of teachers at the earliest levels are not certified. In one district that I'm familiar with. 90% of teachers in Grade One, Two, and Three do not have certification. Teachers who do have training are alarmingly few about 37.2, 7% of teachers do have apt teacher training for the positions that they're in.
Most of the teachers at the lower levels tears and they teach with minimal preparation. Some have had a few years of high school, and then they find themselves working in the most challenging, possible circumstances.
Now that we understand what a typical classroom in Sierra Leone looks like. I want to take a step back and shed some light on the bigger picture and sub Saharan Africa alone, 88% of children or not meeting minimum proficiency levels and literacy. And that 17 million qualified teachers are needed just in sub Saharan Africa to meet the UN's goal of universal access to primary and secondary school by 2030. I'm just hoping you can help us understand the learning crisis in the country.
Yeah, those are sobering statistics. Just imagine that you're a child, you live in a home where farm or trading or tailoring is the main occupation you learn about this by working with, and alongside your family. You play in your neighborhood. You're learning the languages of two to three groups of people mingling. You go to the mosque or church, two places averse, chanting, singing, learning, but there's very, very little reading done at the home front. Now you go to school, your teachers just got a blackboard and she has very, very little training beyond her own school experience.
And along with the paucity of books or other supports, the chances of your learning to read are as slim as research bears out. And learning to read matters. It's not just about reading good books. It's about being able to read directions, find information. It's about being able to read directions on your medication or knowing how to take care of your health. It's about participation. Being able to communicate on paper or with the Internet. It's about having access to news. It’s about being able to read a contract in which you're underpaid or a notice when somebody tries to evict you, It's about transparent accounting and civil participation, and it's about enjoying the delights of literacy, the pleasure of satisfying curiosity, about a subject, being able to record your own thoughts and ideas and experiences.
So children are not learning to read fluently strongly and well. Children's literacy rates are, are alarming. I've just finished a project with CODE. We found out that just half of the Grade Ones know up to half of the alphabet. Grade Twos can read an average of about 10 words only. And none are reading a grade level passage with understanding. Just 1% of fourth graders can read a passage at their level.
As it concerns a nation in urgent need of an economic development, having a strong health sector, having policy and governance work underway, encouraging creative entrepreneurship. These low literacy levels significantly affect the national prognosis. So we have a situation in schools where less than half of all primary school teachers have completed teacher's college.
And yet this is a situation that demands the usual training and skill. Well, children are going to meet hardworking, voluntary, and very loving teachers it's unlikely that they'll have a well trained and certified teacher.
So we have all these untrained teachers who are willing to learn working in classrooms in Sierra Leone, and really that's where our scholarship program comes in. Can you describe the program for us and how it's helping to address the urgent needs that you've been detailing for us?
So as we've developed a program, Transforming Girls Education Project in Sierra Leone, one of the areas that we wanted to address is that there is such great challenges for girls to stay in school.
And one of the contributing factors in this is the lack of women teachers. As children move from class to class, it becomes less and less likely that they're going to meet a female teacher. In our current project, we found out that while 84% of Grade One teachers are women, just 2% of Grade Six teachers were female. And it's not even 1% when you reach secondary school. There are a lot of reasons for this. The most significant one is that most families lack finances or they do not have value enough to ensure that their girl children go on to complete secondary school and go on to college. The percentage of women enrolling in and completing teacher's college is much lower than men due to the additional cultural and economic barriers that face female candidates disproportionately.
Can you describe the structure of the scholarship program?
This program supports young women, who've showed a deep commitment to the field of education, but due to a variety of poverty related barriers have not been able to go on and obtain their formal teaching qualifications. So we put out an advertisement I'm on the radio and posted on doors and in villages for women to apply.
And we were looking for volunteer teachers who are interested in advancing towards a certification. So as qualified teachers, eventually they will be eligible to join the ranks of salary teachers with all the benefits that that will bring: job security, perhaps greater respect from parents and from colleagues,
The scholarship package that we're offering, these young women who are participating in the program is really all encompassing and it's going to offer them the greatest possible chance of completing their three years of teachers' college. Dr. Jo, I'm just wondering if you can tell us what exactly is included?
Well we pay for the basics. It's not a rich prize, but it gives them what they need to complete the certificate. So we pay for their registration and we also support them through that process of registration. Most of this is done online and many of the women in this program have not actually ever worked on a computer before. We paid for their full tuition and administrative fees. We give them an annual stipend for books, stationary photocopying. They get a very modest stipend, which is above the equivalent of $40 a month to support them with life's needs and transportation, to, and from their schools and two visits to the college.
We also support them with mentoring. Paying fees, not enough to ensure young women in challenging circumstances can follow through with their education and get their certificates. Each of the scholarship recipients is also working with a local mentor, a woman who is older than she is or more experienced than she is and can supply her with encouragement and help her talk through some of the issues of teaching.
So it's a comprehensive program in that way, we really support them personally and professionally the money is adequate to all of the needs that are related to the scholarship program and the certification path.
What difference do you believe that these scholarships are going to make in the lives of these young women? And more specifically, what I'm thinking about is how will it change the lives of not only themselves, but of their families and their communities?
I'd really like to read from some of the letters that we have from the scholarship recipients themselves. So let them say it in their own words. Here's a letter from Kadiatu who got her WASC degree. So she graduated with very well from secondary school, but she could never enroll further because of her background.
She writes. I lost my two parents during the 15 year war. Since then, I've only been supported by my aunt who is an ordinary farmer. She's trying, but she can't afford my school fees. The reason that I'm applying is that I've seen many girls who have been involved in early marriages, lost their focus on education gone back to farming. I don't want to be like that anymore. I need this scholarship because girl’s education is very important. As people used to say, when women are educated, the whole nation is educated and the nation will develop. Therefore I want to be educated. I want esteem for myself. I want to see that I have contributed to the development of myself, my family, and the nation. So that was Kadiatu writing, very eloquent.
So this is from a young woman in Maforki. She writes. I have a mindset of supporting children who've been in similar circumstances I have underwent: poor support from home in terms of studies, struggling for basic amenities, exposure to situations that may easily take one's attention from school especially girls. In addition, apart from being a woman, I faced a lot of challenges while going through secondary school. At an early age, I gave birth to my first child, making me miss schooling for awhile.
Then after completion of senior school, I gave birth to another. However, being a mother of two at this age has not killed my dreams of pursuing further studies. I believe it is only education that can help me move above this level. I absolutely do not want to end my career as a dependent housewife. I'm thinking of being reliant on myself and that's why I've chosen to teach voluntarily just to be abreast with school-related work.
Thanks Dr. Jo, for sharing those, I mean, you could definitely hear kind of the will and the drive from these women just in their applications. And how do you think that by having more qualified women teachers, like these individuals in the classroom will help keep more girls in school?
The barriers are significant from very tough home situations that don't allow study time to low expectations in the classroom. And these classrooms are sometimes quite unfriendly to young women. They experience a lot of pressure for early marriage and economic activities for household support, They would be that person who had urged girls in the classroom to be their best. There'll be role models who are going to push them forward towards their fulsome capacity and towards possibility for independence and for the good of their communities.
Female teachers will give empathetic support and advocacy for hygienic private needs that girls have in their early menses. And imagine having a trained teacher, actively fighting gender bias and low expectations in your classroom. It’s not to say that men cannot or would not be gender champions. I know very many Sierra Leone men who are exactly that.
And as we're talking about this subject, what I can remark most definitely is there's a real passion in your voice as you talk about the scholarship program, especially when you're reading the letters, what does this program mean to you personally?
I just feel so privileged to be part of this process.
These are passionate, powerful, interesting gifted women who have simply not had opportunity to go forward and to be part of that process is it is a great privilege.
I was thinking we could give them some words of wisdom. Cause Dr. Jo you're full of wisdom.
I think I would urge them to hang onto the qualities that they came into their education with, which is love for their community and children that be the lens to which they do their teaching always. And high ideals for themselves in community as educated servants of their community, that they use their education to develop the kind of citizens that they themselves are.
I would like to thank Dr. Jo for spending time with us. And I would also like to thank our listeners. Now, we hope that you found this conversation both informative and inspiring, and if you would like to learn more or find out more about you can directly support the scholarships for aspiring teachers in Sierra Leone I invite you to visit www.code.ngo/scholarships.
And I want to leave you with a quote from one of the young women who is participating in the scholarship program. This individual wrote education is better than silver and gold. To me, that really says it all about what we are doing and why we are doing it.
Thanks again, Jo.
Oh, you're so welcome. It was a real privilege to be part of this.