Nuru Ethiopia Partners with Save the Children, Literacy Boost Program

Nuru Ethiopia is pleased to announce a new partnership with Save the Children to implement Literacy Boost in order to increase literacy levels of children in rural farmer households to a grade 2 level before they reach secondary school.

Save the Children currently offers Literacy Boost in many countries around the world, including Kenya, Ethiopia and other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in Southeast Asia and Latin America. Literacy Boost has shown impact on measures of letter and word knowledge, fluency and comprehension for students. Specifically in Ethiopia, Literacy Boost students show 2.5 times more progress in reading words than non-Literacy Boost students [Beyond School Walls: A Boost for Readers]. Literacy Boost is one of many multi-sector programs Save the Children offers across 120 countries to serve more than 166 million children worldwide.

“At Nuru, we are always looking to draw upon best practices and not ‘reinvent the wheel’,” says Jimmy Leak, Ph.D., Education Program Strategic Advisor for Nuru International. “Once we saw the overlaps between Literacy Boost and the Boreda Woreda communities’ educational needs, we approached Save the Children about a partnership. They have been gracious and helpful in providing materials and assisting with our initial training of trainers. We’re look to forward to conducting teacher trainings, starting school reading libraries, co-operative book banks, and conducting community reading activities consistent with the Literacy Boost model.”

Literacy Boost works within communities to strengthen child literacy by developing five core reading skills: letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, reading fluency and comprehension. The program functions alongside national public school curriculum and local languages to improve learning outcomes for primary-aged children in and out of school. The program’s three-pronged approach involves reading assessments, teacher training and community action.

Nuru Ethiopia plans to implement the teacher training and community action components of Literacy Boost for children in and out of schools who are apart of families in Nuru farmer cooperatives in Boreda Woreda, a rural region in the Gamo Gofa Zone of southwest Ethiopia. Nuru Ethiopia will continue to use Uwezo for reading assessments in order to promote monitoring and evaluation consistency with its sister project, Nuru Kenya.

Nuru Ethiopia is a sustainable community development project of Nuru International, a U.S.-based social venture on a mission to end extreme poverty in remote, rural areas. Nuru Ethiopia delivers high touch, holistic programming – in Agriculture, Financial Inclusion, Healthcare and Education – to engage all household members in building resilience and ending intergenerational poverty.