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

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Improving literacy among those who missed the chance to learn to read and write at an early age can be a critical part of improving life chances broadly and creating a more equitable world. Unlike young children, youth have functioned as workers, parents, caregivers, and citizens. Many youth take on all the work and family responsibilities of adulthood. They may work outside the home or help their families with farming or a small business. They may have responsibilities for looking after younger siblings and domestic chores. While there has been an increase in literacy rates globally, progress in sub-Saharan Africa has been slow. "By contrast, sub-Saharan Africa’s rate has converged more slowly, the youth literacy rate increasing from 66% in 2000 to 75% in 2015 and 77.5% in 2020.” (UNESCO, 2023) with almost one in four youth in sub-Saharan Africa being illiterate.

Helping young people acquire and improve their literacy skills can help them build a sense of empowerment, dignity, independence, and efficacy at an individual level, while enabling them to use their literacy skills to support their community’s development. (Butler & Ignatowski, 2010) Improved literacy skills, play an important and powerful role in providing OSY with access to resources and information that can help shape their worldview, develop an understanding of others and be able to act with growing autonomy, judgment, and personal responsibility. The digital age has increased connectivity to social media and with it the risk of exposure to disinformation. Reading comprehension - the ability to understand, remember, and communicate meaning from what has been read is a crucial a skill in evaluating if what one is reading is accurate or misinformation. The development of these foundational skills can ensure that youth have the necessary skills they need to judge whether a news story is real or false and distinguish accurate information from inaccurate information to avoid the harmful effects of disinformation.

Improvements in female literacy can lead to reduced infant mortality, better childhood school attendance, improved family income, higher vaccination rates and more. (World Bank, 2020) Research has also consistently confirmed the importance of literacy for both employment and earnings—independently of an individual’s years of formal education." (Shomos, 2010)

Literacy programs for out-of-school youth (OSY) are often a subset of programs designed to equip youth with the ability to earn livelihoods and are usually considered nonformal education and/or accelerated education programs. Accurate literacy assessments for youth can help ensure that participants are receiving the right level of instruction and making progress. This strengthens, improves, and adds stability to ongoing development initiatives supporting basic education, economic growth, health and family planning, and social justice.

This panel focuses on a specialized literacy assessment for Out-Of-School Youth specifically developed to measure the literacy skills of older youth and young adults and designed explicitly for use with marginalized youth with limited literacy skills living in extreme poverty or post-conflict environments. In addition to measuring foundational reading and writing skills, the assessment incorporates real-life reading items which document the functional literacy skills that youth and adults may have acquired without formal literacy instruction. It is designed to be easily modified for different alphabetic languages and cultures and has been implemented in several contexts including Liberia, Rwanda, Mali, Ethiopia, Guyana, Uganda, and Sierra Leone. It can be used to inform program design, define benchmarks, and assess impact.

This panel will review three different alternative education and livelihood-skills training projects that implemented functional literacy programs and conducted the literacy assessments at different times in different contexts, and whose projects are currently in different stages. The goal of this panel is to discuss lessons learned on adapting the instrument to local contexts, administering the assessment, analyzing, and using results, and reflecting on how the assessment inform project implementation, specifically in accelerated and functional literacy programs.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Mary F Sugrue, Education Development Center

Individual Presentations

• Discovering hidden literacy skills with better assessments in a girls’ empowerment & education project in Sierra Leone. - Andrew Trembley, EDC

• Measuring literacy outcomes from a condensed literacy training component of youth livelihoods training in Liberia. - Gwen Heaner, Education Development Center

• Using literacy assessments to inform program implementation for a Ugandan accelerated education program. - Rachel Christina, EDC; Daniel Lavan, EDC, INC.; Brittany Hebert, Education Development Center EDC