Under the initiative, selected teachers undergo rigorous training; and share the knowledge with colleagues before engaging with students directly.
Some teachers in Kano have been trained in a new method of imparting knowledge to school pupils in a bid to improve the literacy level in the state.
A predominantly Muslim state in Nigeria’s northern region where Islamic and Arabic education dwarfs Western education, the new teaching method is aimed at exposing more schoolchildren to a modern learning system and allowing them to develop academically and mentally.
Executed under the Partnership for Learning for All in Nigerian Education (PLANE) platform, the initiative known as Accelerated Learning is funded by the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), and implemented by a consortium led by DIA, an international development group.
Under the initiative, selected teachers undergo rigorous training; and share the knowledge with colleagues before engaging with students directly.
In a statement by the administrators of the project on Monday, this cascading approach ensures that the benefits of the programme reach a wider audience, ultimately enhancing its impact.
“Unlike the conventional schooling system, it came with assessing the children, knowing their position at a particular time.
“And after the intervention, we see where they are, and you find out that we have the baseline whereby you have more than 75% or 80% of children in literacy. They cannot recognise even letters.
“But after the training, after the intervention, you find out that percentage has actually reduced drastically, and the same thing for those children who were not able to actually read maybe small sentences, we have found at the story level, which is an achievement that is vividly clear,” part of the statement read.
Kano has one of the lowest literacy rates in Nigeria, with 46.1% of the state’s population without primary education, according to a 2018 study.
In February 2024, the United Nations Children’s Fund revealed that about one-third of children going to school in Kano lacked literacy and numeracy skills.
At the national level, 31 per cent of Nigeria’s population is illiterate, while about 10.5 million children aged 5-14 years are not in school across the country, according to UNICEF.
Apart from Kano, the new initiative under the PLANE platform aims to continue strengthening teaching and learning methods in schools across Kaduna, Jigawa, Yobe, and Borno over the next nine years.
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