Literacy Work
Other persons targeted by the programme include men, young girls, and elderly women. This could also include women who have already had the opportunity to learn to read ‘second chance.’
Turkana County has low literacy levels of 20% considering that it has a population of 926,976 speakers of the language. Non-literates account for 741,580.
The Literacy for Women in Africa programme is currently being implemented in the County with 20 active adult literacy classes spread across Loima, Turkana Central, Turkana North, and Turkana South sub-counties. The program has grown tremendously since 2018 when it began with 10 pilot classes. So far, 1920 learners have been trained with 65% of them being women.
The reason why the program majorly focuses on women is that in the marginalized communities women or girls are denied a chance to go to school, as priority is given to men. Women are seen as people who carry out house chores, bear children, go through practices e.g. female genital mutilation (FGM) and early marriages thus denying them a chance to access education or any form of schooling.
The uniqueness of this program is that it is a non-formal mother tongue-based education meant to impact adult learners with basic reading and writing skills. The main goal of the program is to enable the marginalized communities to read the Word of God in their heart language and be transformed by it.
BSK partners with the Church to implement this programme. The Churches provide venues that are used as classes, they identify passionate people who are trained as teachers, and they assist in monitoring. The Directorate of Adult and Continuing Education office has also come in handy in helping learners to transition to formal schooling to learn other subjects.