Education of Disadvantaged Children in OIC:
The Key to Escape from Poverty
24
Box 2 Northern Uganda Literacy Project, Uganda
“Northern Uganda Literacy Project” (NULP) is a literacy promotion programme which started
in 2009 and was developed by a local private education company named “Mango Tree
Educational Enterprises Uganda”. This programme bases its model on mother tongue
instruction.
The Northern Uganda Literacy Project has three main pillars i) mother tongue instruction in
the first grade, ii) teacher training, and iii) promoting parental involvement.
i. Mother tongue instruction in the first grade: As in most countries in Africa, when
children start school they immediately are taught in either a colonial language or in
English which they do not have prior knowledge of. This programme allows children
to be taught literacy skills in their mother tongue. While they are still receiving
English as an additional course, they do not practice writing in English. The
programme follows a moderately slow pace which aims to ensure that no child is left
behind.
ii. Teacher training: The Programme starts with a 5-day training for teachers guiding
them on practical and appropriate classroom skills. This training covers grammatical
features, letters and sounds in the Leblango language. After completing this intense
5-days training, teachers continue in-service workshops for 6 Saturdays throughout
the academic year. The NULP also provides instruction guidelines for each literacy
lesson.
iii. Promoting parental involvement: The Programme enabled a communication
mechanism between parents and teachers via parent-teacher meetings. During these
meetings teachers guide parents on how to interpret their children’s literacy reports
and how to support them at home.
The impact and benefits gained
The impact evaluation of the programme finds large improvements in students’ reading and
writing outcomes when the full costs were covered by the programme. The programme found
an improvement in student recognition of letters by 1.0 SDwhich is one of the largest impacts
ever measured in an RCT of an education programme. However, the reduced-cost version of
the programme did not perform as well as the full-cost covered version. In the former case,
research found an improvement of 0.4 SD on letter name recognition. One of the main gains
of this intervention was the increase in students’ confidence and their positively changed
attitudes towards school. A more positive environment and higher willingness for learning at
school lead to a better basis for teaching and learning outcomes
(Kerwin & Thornton, 2015).