TURKANA, Kenya, Jan 16 (Safaricom Newsroom)- Children in Lobolo, a village on the shores of Lake Turkana, live in a dilemma. They can go to school and start on a path that might lead them out of their current circumstances, or they can get into fishing.
Fishing is a lucrative economic activity in this village especially for children and young people at the expense of their education, with boys particularly affected as men are traditionally involved in the economic activity.
Joseph Ekai and Patrick Anam, both residents of Lobolo, are champions for education, spending many days on the lakeside, persuading the young men who gather there to choose education instead of fishing.
Lobolo is a two-hour drive from Lodwar, one of the vast and famously arid towns in Turkana County.
The road that leads there is a dusty trail that is seemingly endless in the middle of the desert terrain.
The heat and humidity are debilitating. Occasionally, you are likely to see children bolting out of the traditional stick and grass houses called manyattas when visitors arrive.
Joseph and Patrick are synonymous with education in the village. They have become major stakeholders in the Accelerated Learning Programme (ALP) implemented by Zizi Afrique Foundation in partnership with the Safaricom Foundation and the Diocese of Lodwar.
The programme, which started in 2018 in the county, seeks to improve the lives of disadvantaged school-going children by increasing access to equitable and innovative educational opportunities.
ALP engages learners who lack literacy and numeracy skills and brings them up to the right level so that they can be able to read and write, and solve numerical problems. The learners mainly targeted are between Grade 3 and Grade 5.
Turkana was among counties where learners had fallen behind in literacy skills in a study carried out by Uwezo East Africa in 2018. Tana River had also been identified as another area where learners needed catching up and a similar programme has been implemented there. The report from the study showed that only three out five learners between Grade 3 and 8 could read Grade 2 level Swahili.
ALP targets learners both in and out of school and involves teachers and community volunteers making concerted efforts to ensure they move from one stage of learning to another.
The stages are based on initial assessments to establish a learner’s level and know which skills are lacking, with the teachers then working to improve their literacy and numeracy skills.
Joseph and Patrick have learnt it is one thing to ensure the children go back to school and another to keep them there. Some of these children tend to lag behind their peers once in attaining the numeracy and literacy desired, says Rebecca Njue, a Teacher Assistant of the ALP at Lobolo Primary School.
The teacher says the lag is caused by absenteeism as children often get pulled into fetching water and food for the families, which can often mean daylong trekking and sometimes a complete migration from one area to another.
The children who need help are immediately enrolled on literacy camps set up by the ALP programme.
The camps are set up either within the school, where a separate class is set up over lunch hour like a remedial class, or in their communities. The camps take 15 days, with two hours of remedial teaching per day.
For community-based learning, the ALP takes place three days a week while the school-based programme is on weekdays.
So far, there are 774 learners on the programme – 487 under the school-based and 287 in the community-based programmes.
Joseph, a pastor and a fisherman, uses his influence as a religious leader to mobilise the community to take children to school. In addition, he has been cooperating with other religious leaders within the Lobolo community to sensitise them on the importance of education.
Joseph is leading other religious leaders to change the conversation in the community that wealth lies in the education gained rather than the number of livestock that one can gather.
“My passion for championing for education stems from my vision to see a community that is educated and invests their skills and knowledge back in Lobolo,” he says.
He notes, though, once the children go to school, they grapple with lack of food which drives the pupils back to the lake to fish.
“After fishing, they get money to buy food. Another challenge is that sometimes I mobilise the children to go to neighbouring schools like Lochereke Primary because of lack of enough teachers here in Lobolo,” Joseph says.
Nonetheless, he has managed to gather about 30 children to go to school. However, he refuses to take all the credit for his efforts and attributes some of his success to elders and parents who have lent him a hand in going door to door sensitising the community on the importance of education.
Patrick is a parent at Lobolo Primary School. He has been an education champion for four years and has been doing this even though he did not go to school himself.
“I have not gone to school, but I have interacted with people who have, and I admire the way they think. This has uplifted villages and taken communities towards social and economic strength which secured their communities from poverty. I wake up every day dreaming of a Lobolo that is the number one in prosperity,” he says.
Patrick usually tries to persuade the boys about the long-term gains of education outlast the temporary gains of fishing during school hours.
“Education will bring much more than what the lake has to offer, I tell them.”
Wilson Losike, the ALP Coordinator in Turkana County says community champions like Patrick and Joseph have an advantage over government officials, such as chiefs, in convincing parents to take their children to school. They are effective because they have a human face.
Their standing in the village and their determination on ground is ensuring that Zizi Afrique’s education interventions penetrate where they would previously carry little sway.
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