By Our Reporter
Today, millions of children and adults around the world acknowledge the importance of literacy by celebrating International Literacy Day. In Lira, Mango Tree Educational Enterprises, a Ugandan education company will join in worldwide literacy activities by providing two printers to the Lango Language Board (LLB) and Kumam Language Board (KLB).
The boards play a fundamental role in developing and strengthening mother tongue languages in northern Uganda. The printers, provided by Mango Tree with funding from Edukans and ICCO under the Strengthening a Literate Society project, will support the two language boards to publish local language materials and achieve greater long-term sustainability through income generating activities.
In close partnership with the language boards and many other local, national and international stakeholders, Mango Tree developed an instructional methodology that is highly successful and positions mother tongue literacy at the core of the program. A study conducted by the University of Michigan placed Mango Tree’s intervention among the most effective education programs in the developing world. Strengthening local languages is critically important, as research demonstrates that proficiency in one’s mother tongue leads to greater success in reading and understanding a second language such as English.
Mango Tree’s goal is to improve literacy performance among pupils in early primary classrooms and strengthen the literacy infrastructure in northern Uganda so that reading and writing becomes a meaningful part of daily life. Learning to read early and proficiently with comprehension is critical for academic success. Children who do not learn to read in the early years of primary education fall further behind academically, and many eventually drop out of school.
Preliminary results from Mango Tree’s highly successful literacy program suggest learning effects that are three to four times higher than those found in randomized control trials of similar programs in low-income countries. By the end of Primary 1, pupils in Mango Tree schools were one year ahead of their peers in non-program schools in key early literacy skills.
