By Melina San Martin | Project Leader
Dear Donors, Supporters, and Friends of CharChar,
We feel extremely grateful to you for caring about our cause and advocating for literacy for life by supporting our project “Accelerate Literacy for 6,000 Malawian children”. CharChar works to support literacy and quality education as a right that should not be denied to any child. Committed to helping Malawian children to become engaged citizens who can contribute to build stronger and fairer communities, we see literacy as a necessary skill during that journey.
Thanks to your help and support, after less than seven weeks, we have fully funded our first fundraising milestone to ensure literacy becomes a reality for thousands of children in rural Malawi. We’ve been working to overcome one of the most challenging times for education around the world and, more specifically, in Malawi.
The Malawian government was forced to temporarily close schools in March in an attempt to contain the spread of COVID-19. They have now made the decision to begin a phased reopening of schools beginning on September 7. This means that children from grade 8 will return to revise and sit their Primary School Leaving Certificate exam and then children from grades 1 to 7 will return to school three weeks later on a shift basis, subject to the Covid-19 situation remaining contained. All learning will continue to be disrupted due to Covid class size restrictions for the remainder of this term, and the Government will continue to provide distance learning through radio lessons. Meanwhile in the most vulnerable rural communities where CharChar works, learning gains continue to be threatened by the current education crisis, inevitably leading to learning loss that will have repercussions across Malawi for years to come.
Learning from home has its obstacles.
The digital divide in Malawi is a huge challenge -- particularly throughout rural Malawi -- causing inequality across the nation.
Besides the usual shortage of textbooks, it is difficult for children to complete their schoolwork on their own, as they are required to take care of household chores and fetch clean water, a critical need during this pandemic crisis.
To cope with this situation, we are focusing our efforts to respond appropriately to specific local needs. In recent months, CharChar developed and completed a series of 30 short educational and entertaining radio programmes to support continuity of learning for young learners and illiterate youth/adults. Our aim is to supplement the Malawi government’s 30-minute daily radio lessons for early grade learners. This content is now with the government for evaluation and integration into the series of radio programmes currently being designed to supplement continuity of learning over the next 4 months.
Each programme lasts no more than 20 minutes and focuses on four subjects: Mathematics, English, Chichewa, and Expressive Arts. The curriculum was developed around songs and short stories to facilitate fun and engaging learning.
Dynamic programming has a positive impact on children's development and overall performance using this alternative platform. CharChar-supported learners have proven to be able to read a short children's story after two years of receiving primary school lessons. We are focusing on maintaining this progress by making the educational content as accessible as possible to young learners, without the need for textbooks.
While this cannot fully replace the traditional group-lesson curriculum, there are some added positive aspects; in particular, we can reach a wider audience with this type of listener-friendly content, such as illiterate adults and young people who have had to drop out of school for various reasons.
Today, CharChar is collaborating with Malawi’s Ministry of Education to plan for the new academic year and post newly qualified teachers into the 10 schools we’ve been working in prior to the pandemic. This collaboration allows us to focus on reversing the learning losses that threaten to erase years of progress, and more specifically, interrupt the language acquisition achievements of more than 4,000 children in our program who have already far exceeded national statistics.
At the same time, CharChar has been working with Malawi’s Directorate of Teacher Education to develop open distance learning content for student teachers. This will allow us to increase our support to 6,000 students in rural Malawi, providing additional assistance in the implementation of the National Reading Programme once the schools reopen.
The ability to read helps children learn to think about their emotions and express themselves, enriches their lives and allows them to dream beyond their own experiences. It is a crucial part of childhood that no child should be denied. A gift of literacy is literacy for life.
We will close this project as we have reached our goal, but you can still collaborate through our long-standing yearly project “Literacy for Malawi”, where you can learn more about our work and ways to help. Follow the link for more information: https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/literacy-for-malawi/
Thank you for your support!
From the entire CharChar Team, our trustees, our volunteers around the globe, and from me of course.
Melina San Martín
Trustee, Director of Communications & Fundraising
Project Leader for CharChar’s GlobalGiving campaign “Accelerate Literacy for 6,000 Malawian Children”
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
