Non-formal education.-Night school.

The elder sister of School for Life, Non-Formal Education organizes classes for adult learners who never attended school and wish to learn reading and writing. Rates of illiteracy are estimated at 70% in Zebilla and up to 90% in the surrounding  small rural villages.  Previously funded by the World Bank, now by the Government of Ghana, the network operates with minimal expenses. As with School for Life, each district has a coordinator who oversees supervisors. At community level, classes are taught, for free, by unpaid “facilitators” who are rewarded at the end of the two year learning period with goods in kind eg zinc to make a roof. At present though, limited monies mean that facilitators are not paid at all, and are having to buy their own chalk boards and torches to light the teaching area.

Mother attending class, reads from the chalk board-constructed and taken to each lesson by the facilitator.

Details causing me to stop, and double take, continue. A class of learners and facilitator meet three evening s per week for about two hours each session for two years. Classes take place out of doors during the dry season, sheltering within a church or wherever a roof is offered during the rainy season. Each learner brings their own torch. 

Around Zebilla town itself, there are currently twelve classes, each with 25 learners enrolled.

As with School for Life, there are primers or text books for each learner. They offer a structured teaching of phonics, using the English alphabet system. Once sounds are learned- there are 29 basic sounds, with three extra vowel sounds represented,- decoding and writing Kusaal, the local African language, is straight forward. Lessons use a mix of shared learning and participation, oral activities and reading for meaning. Women are encouraged to enroll, partly because of greater levels of illiteracy, but also women remain to look after family, whereas males tend to migrate south during the dry season when there is little paid work available in the arid north of Ghana. Each group of learners is given a small grant to set up an enterprise to generate funds for the class: women are typically asked to take on this role too.