Background
My Village is an ambitious learning intervention project aimed at supporting at least one million children to read and do basic math in the next five years through commu- nity participation.
Why My Village?
Evidence from PAL Network has shown that schooling does not equal learning. Many children go through multiple years of formal education without learning the basics of reading and math. Before COVID-19, 617 million children and adolescents world-wide did not have the foundational skills of reading and doing basic math of which 202 million were from Sub-Saharan Africa. Assess- ments by PAL members, such as Uwezo / ASER and data from Ministries of Education (MoE) have shown that al- most 50% of school aged children are unable to read and comprehend a simple sentence. This global phenomenon of children’s schooling without sufficient learning (as highlighted by PAL’s work) is commonly known as ‘learn- ing poverty’.
Most often interventions have targeted only a fraction
of children, and many being done in schools. The Accel- erated Learning Programs within the PAL Network have been conducted in schools and targets children between grades 3-5. Between 2018 and 2021, the network mem- bers reached over 164,000 children in over 2,300 disad- vantaged communities across eight countries. This is just but a small fraction of children that need to be supported. PAL Network recognises the need to put in more effort to reach more children and support them to acquire founda- tional literacy and numeracy skills as building blocks to a better future.