PUKU.co.za

East Africa Children Poorly Taught

by Nonikiwe - Editor on 12 Jul 2011   |   

While three East African countries have achieved on school enrolment levels, majority of pupils continue to demonstrate incompetence in the two most important aspects of basic education.

A report dubbed “Are our children Learning” shows that children in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda perform poorly compared to the established curriculum standards. The report appears to hold a different tone than another one from Uganda’s examinations body, which points to a slightly brighter outlook.

Uganda boasts of approximately 8.3 million children in primary school, compared to 2.3 million before the programme in 1997. But as the report, prepared by Uwezo, an initiative to improve competencies in literacy and numeracy in East Africa, indicates, there is nothing to be proud of if majority of pupils, though in school, are not able to read and later on deal with numbers.

The tests were for Primary Two and administered to 145,730 children from 79,286 households in 2009/2010. The assessment was done on children between the age of six and 16. But findings indicate that investing in inputs alone has limited impact, and that fresh thinking focused on incentives for learning is needed. Further, it shows that children in the three countries perform poorly compared to established curriculum levels.

• Read complete article at monitor

Kenyan Youths Raise Literacy Levels

by Nonikiwe - Editor on 23 May 2011   |   

Nairobi—Samuel Macharia Kago, Scofield Awiti Muliru and Sophie Ngele Njaramba sought to be the change they wanted to see in their society. The final year Anthropology students at the University of Nairobi hatched an initiative called Literate Kenya that will seek to address and bridge gaps in the education sector through various programmes. The idea behind Literate Kenya is making a difference through education which is amplified in their Vision: Learn to make a difference.

This comes at a time when literacy levels in Africa are wanting. Over the past years the literacy levels in the continent of about one billion people has improved but by a slight margin. The lower literacy level can be attributed to several factors, such as availability as well as accessibility of education facilities and resources, a poor reading culture, political instability in states such as Liberia, South Sudan as well as the socio-cultural context of a people. The initiative is about youths helping other youths and not waiting for the government to affect their lives; it is driven by the urge about doing something to change the situation. Literate Kenya programmes are based on issues such as: Education, Peer Education on issues of sexual responsibility. Girl Child Absenteeism, Environment conservation, Incorporation of Information Technology into the education system and Relief aid. This year the Initiative is undertaking two main projects: The Books Drive and the Hanger Project.

• Read compete article

Kenyan and Zambian Schoolchildren Join Forces to Publish Ground-breaking Book

by Bontle on 06 Jul 2010   |   

250 learners from schools in Kenya have written and published a children’s book about Kenya’s Maasi tribe. The school children are selling the book to raise funds for teaching resources in Kenya. Students and tutors from the University of Central Lancashire have joined the Kenyan learners, providing help and expertise to the creation and publication of the book.

The book, entitled Letters to Africa, features a series of letters exchanged between schoolchildren from Lancashire, Kenya and Zambia who shared stories about their lives and cultures. It also includes a glossary of the Kenyan Maasai tribe language. This is believed to be the first time this has been recorded and written down.

It is being officially launched at the Harris Museum, when 11-year-old Farington Primary School pupil Jack Sagar will get a special prize for writing the best letter.

Also featured is information about Aids awareness sports projects delivered by UCLan students to children in Zambia.

• Read the complete article

Kenyan Schools Urged to Rein in High Fees

by Bontle on 05 May 2010   |   

The Kenyan Ministry of Education has been urged to regulate fees in national secondary schools. This came after chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Education, Mr David Koech, said that providing education was becoming too expensive for parents. Among his recommendations were that principals of public schools should be barred from increasing fees without consulting parents. The concern is that not only can parents not keep up with fee increases but they also cannot cover additional costs of books, uniforms and other learning materials.

In 2008, the Kenyan government promised to roll out their free secondary education programme and raise the number of learners in these schools to 1.4 million. The Government-backed programme has yet to take off as individual schools continue to raise school fees.

The Konoin MP, Dr Julius Kones, urged the government to step in to save the situation adding education risked becoming a preserve of the rich.

The MP warned that if education become too expensive, the country would not realise Vision 2030.

• Read the complete article

Books Donated at London Book Fair to Promote Kenya's Literacy

by Bontle on 20 Apr 2010   |   

Books Abroad, an organisation based in Scotland which encourages greater literacy, will send between 40,000 and 50,000 books to Mombasa in Kenya this summer. A wide range of genres and titles is to be delivered, including children’s books, educational textbooks and fiction.

Like many African states, illiteracy levels run high in impoverished areas, which in itself contributes to a perpetuation of the poverty cycle.

The scheme, which is taking place in conjunction the Chandi Parivar Trust, an organisation which helps communities in eastern Africa, will also see a group of 20 volunteers fly out to the country to see for themselves the impact of such schemes.

Volunteers will distribute books in schools and deprived areas and engage in literacy projects with the local community.

• Read the complete article

Parents Blamed for the decline of Reading Culture in Kenya

by Bontle on 13 Apr 2010   |   

The debate on the declining reading culture among Kenya’s younger generation has been a hot topic among academics and writers across the country. Although Kenya has a vibrant publishing industry, the reading culture is poor. Despite this, the children’ s book market is on an upward trend. Compulsory Free Primary Education (FPE) has played a significant role in this; making the publication of educational books for children at primary school a lucrative business.

Some blame the parents as well as the government for not encouraging a reading culture, while others blame the education system. E-learning has emerged as a solution to the problem of the declining reading culture with education officials meeting in Nairobi to promote reading.

“Once held as a largely neglected domain, books for children have over the past few years been on the increase. This is evidenced by the growing number of publications rolling off the printers and displayed in bookshops,” says a senior official at the Jomo Kenyatta Foundation, Kenya’s leading publishing firm. “You will also find publications (not necessarily from the mainstream publishers) being sold by hawkers in bus stops.”

• Read the Complete Article at Coastweek

Children's Magazine is First of Its Kind in East Africa

by Bontle on 13 Apr 2010   |   

The aim of establishing Mujtaba Magazine in Kenya was first to foster Islamis values in Muslim children from an early age. The magazine is the first of its kind in East Africa and is just as much about growing a love of reading in Kenyan, Ugandan and Tanzanian youths. The magazine is also sold in a number of other countries including th United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.

Nazneen Karim, editor of Mujtaba in Kenya, suggests that parents and teachers should choose books for their children that will contribute in molding them into good citizens while promoting the culture of reading that is on a downturn in Kenya.

“Parents should encourage their children to read books that are commensurate with their age and avoid giving them those that are beyond them in the delusion that by doing so, the will be learning ahead of time and their peers,” she says.

• Visit Mujtaba’s Website

World Read Aloud Day Joins African Children of the World

by Bontle on 17 Mar 2010   |   

Earlier this month, thousands of individuals in over thirty-five countries participated in World Read Aloud Day. The aim of this event proposed by the organisation LitWorld was to raise awareness for the importance of literacy across all countries, and promote the transformative power of children’s literature.

Authors in a Harlem book store read to kids in Ghana via Skype, Illinois third graders read to their classmates, and hundreds of people tweeted their favorite read-alouds as part of yesterday’s first World Read Aloud Day. One organisation, the School-to-School partnership program, as part of the Millennium Cities Initiative, put two groups of school-children in contact through technology.

The first group included Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC; Arya Primary School in Kisumu, Kenya; and Ecole le Progrès in Bamako, Mali. Those students joined each other via Skype, reading aloud a few “wild adventure stories” they wrote together in serial fashion, in advance of the event. The students seemed genuinely thrilled to interact with one another and to be able to connect with a school on the other side of the world.

The second group paired fifth graders from Miner Elementary, a public school in Washington, DC, with students from Opoku Ware Junior High School in Kumasi, Ghana. Despite a power outage across much of Ghana that day, the students were able to connect briefly via Skype, make introductions and ask a few questions of one another. The students at Miner were also able to read aloud the “wild adventure story” they had written together with their DC and African counterparts and to send instant messages to the students in Kumasi.

• Read More About the Event at Earth Institute

African Stories for African Children

by Bontle on 09 Feb 2010   |   

Kenyan’s community organisation African Children’s Book Box Society has made its aim to provide the children of Africa with books about their lives and their continent. The organisation purchases children’s books from publishers in Kenya and Tanzania. Most Kenya books are in English but several are published in Swahili and some other traditional languages. Tanzania has 80% of its book published in Swahili. African folktales, poetry, animal stories, plays, stories from contemporary Africa and non-fiction books are all collected and deposited into the book boxes. The aluminium boxes are built by local craftsmen and the books are produced locally, creating employment opportunities for local publishers, writers and illustrators.

Though the Book Box Society began in 1991 with the main purpose to increase literacy in Africa, it has since expanded its work to include school lunch programs and partial payments of school teachers and librarians. Read more here.

To date over 25,000 school children have benefitted from this project.

For the past 15 years fundraising for the Book Box Society has remained modest. Funds have been donated by family, friends, schools and churches. The response has been deeply gratifying.

In total 232 book boxes have been distributed in Kenyan and Tanzanian schools. In addition 1000 books have been used to establish the innovative mobile book box program at the Nairobi Teachers Centre

 

• Read the complete article at The African Book Box

Children’s Book Publisher's Passion Pays off

by Nonikiwe - Editor on 06 Jan 2010   |   

When Lawrence Njagi’s son was about to attend kindergarten in 2000, the young father discovered that there were no pre-primary books featuring local themes. He was also unhappy with the layout and content of the books he found.

Then, the majority of books and other learning materials came from the US, the UK, and India, Mr Njagi realised with disappointment. He felt the books led African children into thinking that they were not intelligent enough because all they saw on the pages were white children.

This led him to begin writing. Thus began Mr Njagi’s long journey of building Mountain Top Publishers, which specialises in Early Childhood Development and Education (ECDE) books and other learning aids.

• Read the complete article