WORLD VISION CHAD HELPS TEACHERS PROVIDE BETTER MATH AND READING SKILLS FOR CHILDREN

It has been a difficult year for children and teachers in Chad. After several months of not receiving their salaries, Chad’s teachers have been on strike since October 2016. That meant that for the first quarter of the school year, children were unable to attend classes. Although classes resumed in early January, parents have been struggling not only to enroll their children, but also to pay for school supplies. To facilitate the resumption of courses in this challenging climate, World Vision Chad has distributed 150 books to 11 schools in the Pendé and Beti Area Development Projects (ADPs).

In late April, I visited the Eastern Logone region, where I met 45 teachers at the level of grades1, 2, and 3 at a local community centre where training was occuring. . One of the first people I met was Digambaye Nodjinan Gilbert, who is in charge of the Center for Continuing Education of Primary Teachers in the local area. This center is the partner in the training initiated by World Vision, which is designed to develop specific objectives and the methodology for teaching reading skills to students. Mr. Digambaye welcomed the intervention of World Vision: "When, the specific objectives are poorly formulated, , it is difficult for teachers to achieve the objectives. As a result, the most regrettable consequence is that at the end of the school year, children can not read nor use calculation skills."He added that in recent years, as part of teacher monitoring and evaluation activities, it is clear that the majority of teachers find it difficult to formulate the specific objectives and techniques one of the key goals of Chad’s national education strategy, which emphasizes that "all children in the intervention zones are capable in reading and numeracy by the age of 11".

The overall objective of this training was to strengthen the capacity of teachers so that they could better guide children to help them meet Chad’s ambitious educational goals. But this training is only part of the solution. One of the  participants, Edingaral Parfait, noted that teachers in Chad face many other difficulties, including the lack of tables, books, and index cards in their classrooms. There continues to be a shortage of qualified teachers and many community teachers lack motivation to their jobs effectively, which is often caused by parents' unwillingness to pay their children's registration fees. As he told me: ,« All this does not make the task easy for teachers, particularly since it is necessary to add the constant change of to our own learning methods. »

Although many challenges remain, World Vision Chad is hopeful that these teachers can provide the children of our ADPs with the support they need to reach a level of reading appropriate to their age. Follow-up will be done at the end of the year to ensure this objective is being met.