Discovering hidden literacy skills with better assessments in a girls’ empowerment & education project in Sierra Leone.

• In Event: How specialized literacy assessments inform program adaptation and implementation in alternative education and livelihood-skills projects in Sierra-Leone, Liberia, and Uganda.

Proposal

A girl’s education project in Sierra Leone focused on providing out-of-school girls aged 13-17 sought to empower AGYW with literacy, numeracy, business, and socio-emotional skills. Most participants had never attended school; however, many had developed some reading skills to navigate their lives. Evaluators adapted the Out of School Youth Literacy Assessment to create a tool that could measure literacy skills acquired in an educational setting as well as through experiential learning. In complement, a numeracy assessment was developed that included assessments that used traditional numeracy assessment tasks and the ability to interact with quantities in daily life (such as paying for goods).

The assessment found that many participants who were unable to complete traditional reading subtasks (such as letter recognition) were able to complete tasks that measured experiential knowledge, such as recognizing signs for stores or reading instructions. This served the project in several ways. At baseline, it provided the insight that many participants possessed pre-literacy skills that would otherwise have been unknown and allowed the content to reflect the current skills of participants. Further, it allowed the project to identify subgroups that were starting at a different level of literacy to target for greater support. Finally, it allowed the evaluation to identify a great deal of literacy progress that would have been invisible if more traditional tools had been used. Many participants who showed no literacy skills at the onset of the project developed greater functional literacy and numeracy skills as part of the project – they may not have qualified as proficient on reading a paragraph but went from not being able to recognize any letters or numbers to being able to give change, sign their name, and identify key information in a text.

The project demonstrated impressive success in improving participants’ literacy, numeracy, self-confidence, and economic empowerment. The literacy and numeracy skills could have gone unnoticed if the tools had not been adapted to consider the knowledge and experience of out-of-school girls.

Author

• Andrew Trembley, EDC