IBIS provides quality education for 3,000 out-of-reach children
Fourteen-year-old Adams Swali is in Class Four and is the School Prefect of the Jello DA Primary School, which was previously a Wing School. Growing up, he wanted to become a police officer to prevent theft of the produce of hardworking farmers such as his father.
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However, the dream seemed more like a mirage, as the nearest school was the Kpandu D/A Primary School which was six kilometres away from Jello.
He, therefore, had to follow his father to the farm daily, engaging in the tedious agricultural work characteristic of rural life in Ghana, until his community mobilised to establish a wing school.
Busura Yakubu, a Class Two pupil of the Chihigu Wing School, challenges her classmate Yussif Yakubu on the pronunciation of Dagbani words written on the blackboard.
At five years, she has gained the confidence of reading, writing and learning other primary school subjects in her local dialect to assert herself.
She walks to the board, takes the pointer from her classmate and pronounces the words in an environment where Wing School teachers Yakubu Sulemana and Sahada Salifu facilitate learning for children to fully express themselves.
As for Osman Salifu, 14 years old and physically challenged, the Chihigu Wing School provides the opportunity to participate in all learning activities, instead of being left on his own because of his inability.
At the Kokolombo Wing School, Hilda Kada, the teacher, combines the multi-grade teaching method to take pupils of classes one to three through the elements in the skies.
As the older children are facilitated in their learning, their toddler siblings look on inquisitively, sometimes endeavouring to join in the activities of the older ones who have been given the opportunity of a lifetime.
Concept
These children of communities in the East Gonja District of the Northern Region are among the more than 32,257 in remote areas of four districts being empowered to realise their right to the constitutional guarantee of Free Compulsory Basic Education through the Wing School Project.
The project provided the communities with the opportunity to mobilise to set up schools using community teachers, the mother tongue (LI) as a medium of instruction and learner-centred, gender-sensitive participatory teaching methods that make the child an active participant in all activities.
IBIS, together with other Danish and Ghanaian civil society organisations, with the support of DANIDA, decided "to contribute to the educational equality policy," Mr Zakaria Sulemana, the Education Programme Director at IBIS, Tamale, said in an interview.
The partners are the Northern Network for Education Development (NNED), East Gonja Civil Society Association (EGOCSA), Choice-Ghana, School for Life (SfL), Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), the East Gonja District Assembly (DA) and the Ghana Education Service (GES).
Communities in the twin districts of Gushegu and Karaga were chosen because they were the least performers in the BECE at the time of introducing the project in 2007, according to a baseline survey by the partners.
Additionally, communities are dispersed, remote and hard-to-reach, with some termed as communities located "in the darkest spots of the district."
To top it all, another baseline survey by partners in 2010 showed that about half of the 60,665 children of school age in the districts were not in school because they did not have schools within walking distances, particularly for children between four and eight years.
First bold steps
After communities were mobilised by partners to dialogue and reach consensus on the education of their wards, IBIS provided the initial pavilion under which the children sat to begin the learning adventure.
IBIS also supported with the stipend of the teachers, insisting that half of the Wing School teachers should be female for gender equality. The organisation, with the support of DANIDA, also committed to the pre-service training and in-service training of the teachers, as well as paying for their career upgrades through certificate courses undertaken during holidays or distance education programmes.
The teachers, graduates of senior high schools, were recruited by the communities themselves.
The LI was adopted to make instruction and learning easier, build up the confidence of children to make them numerate and literate for a smooth transition into the formal educational stream when their schools were later formalised.
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Results
For the District Coordinating Director of the East Gonja District, Mr Abdul Karim Yahaya, "the aim was to provide education for about 2,000 out-of-school children, but more than 3,000 children enrolled in the 20 Wing Schools in East Gonja District and received quality education."
Mr Yahaya expressed both happiness and sadness at the end of the project in his district.
"I am happy because through the effort, deprived children have had the opportunity at education; sad, as there are a lot more unschooled children in the district who may end up as herd-boys and 'Kayayei' if the schools are not sustained and expanded," he said.
His sentiments are similar to those of Mr Philip Dibabe, a former District Director of Education for Saboba, who set up some Wing Schools in the area between 2011 and 2012 in remote communities such as Takpalb and Nawalbo.
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Out of a total number of 11 Wing Schools initiated by him, with the support of IBIS/partners, nine have become formal primary schools for the communities.
For him, the Wing School "is the way to go" in tackling inequality in basic education, challenges of teacher attrition and poor numeracy and literacy aptitudes of children in deprived communities.
Mr Yahaya and Mr Dibabe are also both in agreement that the government is up to the task of sustaining the effort when partners end their work on March 30, 2017.
For Mr Yahaya, the DA would have to immediately discuss support as partners end and find ways to sustain the schools and teachers.
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Best practices
Responses from Circuit Supervisors of the East Gonja District were promising, with supervisors endeavouring to share best practices across the two educational streams, the Wing Schools and the formal schools.
Best practices, such as the progress made with the L1, are shared with formal schools to improve learning. Learner-centred, gender sensitive and participatory learning methods adopted by Wing School teachers are also shared with formal school teachers to improve teaching competencies.
According to the Deputy Director of Supervision at the Education Directorate of the East Gonja District, the Wing Schools have even provided standards of comparison in education.
"We sometimes swap supervisors, making them supervise different areas. We then compare their notes, and strategise," he told the Daily Graphic at one such strategy meeting in Salaga before a monitoring exercise.
"The project has been so successful that 16 out of the 20 schools have been made formal schools by the GES,” he said.
"The fact that the Regional Directorate of Education has written to us to forward the schools to be formalised is testimony of our advocacy of the Wing Schools as a good policy for the government to sustain," he said.
Eye opener
Community ownership has also ensured a fully engaged School Management Committees (SMCs) which lead the community support in feeding and supporting teachers and Wing Schools.
Most SMCs interacted with thought, the Wing Schools were "eye openers" for themselves and their children.
The best part of it, according to the female members, was that Resilience In Northern Ghana (RING), a programme sponsored by USAID, with the Wing School Project, built the capacity of the women of the community in livestock to enable them to support any future incidentals of the education of their children.
The stories were similar at the Kolombo Wing School with the SMC and the community supporting the teacher, Hilda, with foodstuff, and at the Upandu DA Primary School where they supported with feeding children and teachers such as Ms Martha Yemaye, Ms Rebecca Kamiche Adamupe, Mr Bageen Joshua and Mr Kwame Noah Tinji.
It was envisaged by partners that the teaching model of the Youth Employment Scheme would have provided the vehicle through which the youth of the Wing School communities would be engaged.
However, the challenge of a small quota provided for recruiting such youth resulted in IBIS taking up the stipend of the teachers and the communities supporting it.
As they end
As partners end the fulfilling effort in ensuring that children in deprived communities have equal access to education, Mr Sulemana is also expressing hope that the GES and the DA will prioritise the recruitment of the 60 wing school teachers, trained, skilled and holders of teachers’ diploma to continue to deliver quality learning to the over 3,000 children in East Gonja.
Teachers such as Mr Kwame Noah Tinji engages his pupils to use pebbles in a math lesson through the TLM skills gained; Hilda deftly uses Gonja and English in MGT of classes one to three and Rebecca uses Likpakpaln (the Konkomba language) in teaching energy sources such as crude oil.
Mr Ibrahim Attah, the SMC chair of the Chihigu Wing School, making a case for government to support their efforts