About World Literacy Initiative

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.
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:
"If you educate a man, you educate an individual, if you educate a woman, you educate a nation."
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,
"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"
(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.

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.