USAID Helps Ghana Bring Reading Back to Yendi Public Primary School

With support from USAID/Ghana’s Learning project, Ghana’s Ministry of Education is bringing reading back to the public school classroom. Assessments in 2013 and 2015 indicated that 50 percent of children in primary grade 2 struggled to read a single word. Together, USAID and the Ministry are determined to bring positive change by strengthening student performance and having more children reading with fluency and comprehension.

Experts within the Ministry’s Ghana Education Service identified the “phonemic” approach to reading instruction as an international best practice that could help Ghanaian children learn the reading fundamentals. The intervention focuses on teaching the building blocks of reading: letter recognition, sounding letters, decoding and forming words, building vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.

The Ministry introduced the phonemic approach in the Yendi Municipality of the Northern Region in January 2017. On March 31, Ministry officials, reading experts, and project managers from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) visited Yendi to monitor progress. In a class of more 40 students, the team randomly chose 12 students and found that every child could read. Overall reading progress for the class had jumped from 3 percent of children reading words to 64 percent in within two and one half months.

While assisted by technicians from the USAID Learning project, this remarkable achievement is largely driven by the Ministry and the Ghana Education Service. Through the Learning project, USAID supports the Government of Ghana to increase the number of Ghanaian children who are able to read with fluency in English and Ghanaian languages in the early grades of primary school. Ghana’s effort to produce readers is supplemented by the activities of other key partners such as UKAid’s support toward Complementary Basic Education — which teaches reading and math to out-of-school children — and UNICEF’s Inclusive Education project, which helps children with special needs in reading and math.

USAID and the Ministry are strongly encouraged by these positive results in Yendi Municipality. The intervention will expand to 100 districts during the 2017–2018 school year.