About
World Literacy Initiative, Inc.
World Literacy Initiative is a 501 (3)(c) private,
non-profit, non-governmental organization (NGO) incorporated and headquartered
in Atlanta, Georgia in the United States. Its mission is to work towards
improving literacy and basic education throughout the developing world. Although
its work to date has been exclusively in sub-Saharan Africa, its concern
is with all developing nations everywhere.
The Relationship
Between Literacy and Development
- World Literacy Initiative's
Global Strategy
World Literacy Initiative's
strategy for achieving its mission goal is to make especially effective
educational methods freely
available to the people of developing nations. Quality education
generally - and female literacy most particularly - are central to development. In fact,
after studying a great number of developing nations, the World Bank concluded that improving female literacy
is one of the most fundamental of requisite achievements for a developing nation to
attain, for just about all aspects of development as we know and understand it
depend on the presence of this milestone - including economic development,
improvement in health and welfare, and
good
governance.
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Female Literacy. Sustainable progress in developing countries becomes more attainable when its adult population, particularly its women, are literate and minimally educated. From West Africa, a slightly expanded Ghanaian proverb puts it this way: |
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| "If you educate a man,
you educate an individual, if you educate a woman, you educate a nation." |
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| Most significantly, the United Nations found in studying 89 developing countries, that as women become more literate, the rate of infant deaths declines (see chart). Additionally, in what might be construed by some as a counter-intuitive finding however, this fact does not then lead to an increase in population, since fertility rates appear to be inversely linked to female literacy as well (e.g., Nirmala, V.,; Bhat, K. Sham, 1998). | |
| Moreover, it is in common agreement that civil instability can only become more likely when fueled
by the illiteracy of populace. And finally, |
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"There
is good evidence to suggest that the quality of education as measured by test scores has an influence upon . . . the extent to which individuals can improve their own productivity and incomes" |
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(emphasis added, World Bank's Independent Evaluation Group, 2005). It is therefore easy to understand why universal primary education is a key Millennium Development Goal.
Effective Methods of Teaching
Clearly then, improving education is a
primary means towards achieving sustainable development in the world today.
However, the question now becomes, "how do we go about improving education"?
And, 'Why has this not already occurred'?
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In answer to the first, there are of course many
ways to 'improve' education including building better schools, acquiring better, more current textbooks and
so on, but these issues have been addressed in many places and are occurring in others even now yet
these
improvements have not led to the changes sought in academic achievement.
The one key factor that has yet to be thoroughly exhausted is
to introduce and use of most effective teaching methods known. In many places,
these have scarcely been taught to teachers or are taught so poorly as to be
useless. And so, the
next question arises:
Why has this been the case?
Again, whereas many answers are possible, it seems as though that the
choices made before now, country by country, were not done specifically with
respect to the success of the chosen methods' empirical basis - especially in
African schools. Rather, what was trendy appears instead to have been the
guiding influence. Thus guided by what was perceived as the current trend and
couched perhaps in theoretical bias, choices for those methods that work
the most
effectively were not made. Even today, many educators in African countries
are
surprised to learn that alternatives even exist. This tragic circumstance
translates directly into ill prepared learners who, falling progressively
behind, have little choice but to decline further school attendance.
E. D. Hirsch (1996; 99) effectively argues that a failure to prepare a learner for the next grades' pre-requisite expectations and requirements is today's new civil rights frontier, and in Africa, this could not be more the case (c.f., Tabulawa, 2003). World Literacy Initiative, agrees that preparing learners for the next grade level is one of the greatest moral obligations of the teacher, the learner's school and perhaps, again as Hirsch has also suggested, the most easily corrected form of injustice in education today.
Methods Based on the Evidence. World Literacy Initiative has identified methods not by resorting to a different theoretical bias or a new 'school of thought'. This would lead to results that are just as undesired. Rather, it has identified methods that are simply the most effective at producing gains in academic achievement. The day that other methods are proved more effective than these, then the new ones will take the place of the old. There is no allegiance to the methods themselves; only to their effectiveness.
These methods, the subject of many review articles and the prominent outcome of many meta-analytic studies (studies which statistically summarize the findings of many other studies), have already been proven effective. Yet, these most effective methods require no high tech support (even electricity) in order to produce improved learning and more student-friendly learning environments.
Quite reasonably, we call these methods Evidence Based Methods of Instruction (EBMI). Click on the link in the prior sentence to learn more.
