It’s easy for most people in Western countries to conjure up images of impoverished African children. And it may be easy as well to think of celebrities standing in front of schools that they have sponsored. What lies in between these images is a cycle of poverty and illiteracy that is generations old.
In Ghana, major improvements in education have been made over the last decade. But in rural Arica, change comes much more slowly. More than half of all children who actually enroll in school at the primary level end up dropping out. This cycle is one of the things that has led so many organizations who simply build school buildings to fail. Without involvement from parents, it’s difficult for children to adopt study habits that can create a love of education. It may be difficult to imagine a life without books, without a favorite story from childhood. But books are so rare and English literacy is so uncommon that is incredibly common in rural Africa.
Even stable building structures are rare. More than half of classrooms need to be rebuilt each year by parents because they collapse when severe weather comes. Often they have no access to sanitation facilities. And many of the existing schools are far from children’s home and so they are less likely to be attended at all if there are roadblocks to attendance. And once again, a lack of interest in education and literacy means that the desire to keep the existing schools functioning can be fairly uncommon.
The other barrier to creating opportunities for literacy is a lack of teachers. Though education is theoretically compulsory in Ghana, finding teachers who will remain in rural areas is extremely difficult. There simply isn’t sufficient motivation to live and teach in conditions that are substandard. Because of this, if the children in rural Ghana are lucky enough to attend school, what they receive is often rudimentary literacy skills that might provide enough education to find basic employment. Going on to secondary school (or what in the US is referred to as high school) is very rare because they don’t have the skills necessary to compete. This creates a vast divide between the rural and urban areas of the country. The particularly sad part is that so many of these children would gladly attend school if they had the option. One of the schools that we will be building in our first phase is currently operating out of the home of a local woman. “If you can build a building,” she said, “I can easily triple the amount of students in my school.”
The Ayele Foundation can break all of these barriers. We want to build buildings, but we also want to bring teachers to those buildings so that they can be self-sustaining. Most importantly, we want to create an investment in the education each of the villages that we work with on each level: in their families and the community level at large. The people of Ghana that we have met and worked with want to break the cycle of illiteracy when they realize how deeply it affects their lives. By improving the education that the children of rural Ghana receive, permanent upward growth can and will happen.