USAID Mission Director Kimberly A. Rosen joined Ghana’s Minister of Education, Dr. Yaw Adutwum, this week to conclude the USAID Partnership for Education: Learning Activity.

USAID Mission Director Kimberly A. Rosen joined Ghana’s Minister of Education, Dr. Yaw Adutwum, this week to conclude the USAID Partnership for Education: Learning Activity.

This eight-year partnership supported the Ministry of Education (MOE) to improve the reading skills of students in 11 Ghanaian languages and English.

Since 2014, the project has trained more than 68,000 teachers, headteachers, and curriculum leads and reached over 750,000 students from kindergarten 2 to basic 2 in more than 7,200 schools across Ghana.

“Reading at an early age improves educational outcomes and long-term livelihoods, benefiting communities across Ghana. USAID has demonstrated our commitment to supporting the Ministry and strengthening the human and institutional capacity of its agencies to improve children’s reading performance. The U.S. government and Ministry’s partnership is an established one. Together these past eight years, we bore significant fruit.
“The $97 million dollar Learning activity was judged by an external evaluation to improve students’ reading abilities by a tenfold increase in average words per minute—the largest effect size of any early grade reading program worldwide. These are results we can all be proud of,” said USAID Mission Director Kimberly Rosen at the event co-hosted by the Ministry of Education.

According to the statement distributed by the APO Group on behalf of U.S. Embassy in Ghana, the collaboration between USAID and the Ministry of Education through the Learning Activity is one of the key partnerships between Ghana and the United States.

The activity provided over 15 million high-quality teaching and learning reading materials, including teacher guides, pupil books, supplementary readers, and classroom materials – including braille materials for children with low or no vision. All of the materials produced by the partnership between USAID and the Ministry are aligned to the new curriculum and have been adopted nationwide for use in all public schools.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when schools were closed, USAID partnered with the MOE, the Ghana Education Service, and the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation to launch the National Reading Radio Program, providing access to literacy programs for over 1.6 million learners. In January 2022, after a year of the radio lessons airing, 57 percent of children improved their English reading scores, helping to prevent learning loss during the pandemic.