Senegal’s Jangadoo initiative gets positive appraisals

The flagship Jangadoo initiative by the Cheikh Anta Diop University’s Lartes branch has received positive appraisals by foreign participants at an educational meeting looking into improving the quality of learning among children which began in the Senegalese resort of Saly on Tuesday.
Syeed Ahamed, the CEO of IID Bangladesh Thursday summed up the consensus of opinion among participants that the grassroots Senegalese initiative is a pacesetter in the cause of bringing education to children otherwise disadvantaged, removed and marginalized from the educational mainstream.

Jangadoo is a local Wolof word which translates as learning together, the logic being to engage children pedagogically using members of the community such as volunteer teachers, retired educationists and suitable parents as learning mediators.

Speaking in an exclusive interview with APA, a day after participants were taken on a conducted tour of Jangadoo pilot schools in various parts of the country, Mr. Ahamed said many of them came away largely impressed with the resounding results of the initiative.

He explained that during his visit to a Jangadoo school in Rufisque, a township on the outskirts of the capital Dakar on Wednesday, he was particularly struck by the orderly atmosphere in which the teacher-to-pupil ratio in all the classes were 1 to 4.

According to him, the free and unpacked classrooms guarantee a more conducive atmosphere for personal interactions between teachers and pupils, a situation which helps determine the strengths and weaknesses of learners.

He however suggested that some improvements to the structures of the schools are necessary to impact positively on the learning situation for children.

He said for example that the toilets serving pupils were unhygienic and inappropriately too close to the school gate while another suggestions was for remedial classes to be increased since what some of the touring participants witnessed was mostly revisions.

John Mugo of the Kenya arm of East Africa’s Uwezo educational assessment programme described Jangadoo as a serious test case for like-minded initiatives elsewhere in the world given that utilizing young women as volunteer teachers helps inspire young children particularly girls to continue to stay in school.

As the meeting enters its third day, participants will be grouped into working groups to look into the six key programme of activities of the People’s Action for Learning in the intervening year. These are communication and advocacy, research, training and capacity building, assessment to action, data and design and fundraising and partnership.

The organizers of the meeting is the PAL Network which comprises organizations such as the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) which originated in India in 2005 and spread to Pakistan three years later. The acronym also means Impact in Hindi.

Other members of the network are Jagandoo in Senegal and Uwezo which covers Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya translating from Kiswahili as Capacity.

The network is driven by a drive to acquire reliable information and data upon assessing the basic reading and numeracy competencies of children in their home settings using citizen-led assessment modes.

The theme of the Saly meeting is “From Assessment to Action”, encapsulating the stated conviction of this global educational coalition that such assessments provide the only reliable means of determining whether all children are acquiring basic skills, as “the building blocks for all future progress in school”.

Over a ten-year period, the network’s members have conducted 40 assessments on national scales, involving over 60, 000 volunteers to gauge the ability of school going children to read, and solve arithmetical problems.