NN37, May 2006
Special Theme on Education and Training out of Poverty? A Status Report
LITERACY EDUCATION AS A TOOL FOR DEVELOPMENT:VIEWS FROM NORTHERN GHANA
By Adams Bodomo, University of Hong Kong
1. IntroductionI argue in this short article (which derives from a longer academic paper on the definitions and roles of adult literacy in socio-economic development (Bodomo 1999)) that one of the best ways to ascertain the role of literacy education as a tool for socio-economic development is to look at what newly trained adult literates say about, and do with, their newly acquired skills. I illustrate this with experiences I gained as an adult literacy campaigner in various parts of northern Ghana 20 years ago. In northern Ghana the end of an adult literacy programme is often marked at a Literacy Day, a kind of graduation ceremony, in which newly trained adult literates display their newly acquired skills in the form of readings, recitations and short performances.
2. From the "Horses' Own Mouths": A literacy day in northern Ghana
The atmosphere is serene. A young man in his early 20s rises from the crowd gathered at the village center. He walks to the podium and begins to read a poem in his mother tongue. It is a poem about being born again, about seeing the world anew. It is the first written poem of a whole "tribe", read in the presence of chiefs and elders, of literacy practitioners and of the political head of the district by a graduating adult literate. He wrote it himself!
It is another Literacy Day taking shape in an Nchumburung-speaking village in the northern Region of Ghana. And at this point, it is almost impossible to describe the feelings of literacy practitioners. These could probably be compared only to the feelings of a mother at the first glance of her newly born baby or even to those of a doctor at the awakening smile of a patient-come-back-to-life. On Literacy Day, the main function is the award of certificates and diplomas to participants of the literacy programme in the district, especially those who have completed the final stage of the programme. This award is comparable to an initiation ceremony in which the graduand is initiated into the world of literacy. Participants demonstrate their newly acquired cognitive abilities by reading various texts, mainly in the mother tongue and in English. At this point they are known and accepted by all, including the instructors and everybody else in the village to be literate. There is pomp and fanfare, drumming and dancing; drinking of traditionally brewed beer, pito, and general merry-making throughout the day and long into the night.
But beyond all this pomp and fanfare there is something that has always interested me and should interest all literacy researchers. Long before the Day, on the Day and after the 'initiation' Day, certain pronouncements the newly endowed adult literates make can hardly be ignored by anyone who seeks to have a deeper understanding of what it is for someone -a conscious adult - to transform from a situation, a condition of non-literacy to one of literacy. A young man in his early 20s told me:
"I could not see what many others saw, I am now a new person".
He added, light-heartedly, that he could now comfortably compete for the most beautiful ladies in the district. Another exclaimed:
"Before this class, each time I was traveling in a bus I couldn't tell the names of towns I came past. Now I can read the name of each town as I ride past. I am a better traveler."
A middle-aged cash crop farmer said:
"Now, I no more need anyone to tell me what fertilizer to buy for my crops. I find that out myself on the bag".
A trader who normally travels to Kumasi and Accra explained:
"Things are better for me now in the shops of Tamale, Kumasi and Accra; I don't need anybody to tell me the prices of things I buy in the shop. Thanks to the literacy class, my eyes are now open. I am a better trader". An old man employed as a watchman, reports that since he joined the classes things are now clearer on his salary slip. Entrepreneurs of small-scale industries such as pito brewing and sheabutter extraction, who are mostly women, often report to instructors that they are able to keep better records of their customers and thereby track down perpetual defaulters. Finally a village chief, who himself went through the literacy initiation process summed it all up for his people, when in his speech at one of the many Literacy Days he talked of the fruits of the literacy process as follows:
"What you have taught us is very important. We can now also see what you can see in the book, on the road, in the shop, in the market, on bags and on walls, we can now see the world with both eyes and have become part of it".
3. Conclusion
Literacy education is a contentious concept and we will continue to discuss it role and how effective it can be in improving the lives of people. For instance, poor remuneration and low salary levels of teachers and other literates and "book-knowers" in the villages of northern Ghana often lead some villagers to claim that literacy education is not helpful at all in ameliorating the lives of people and "putting food on the table". Some of these people thus hesitate to send their children to schools and adult literacy programmes, preferring instead to let them work on farms. It evokes a varied number of definitions and this trend will intensify in the literature, especially with the blossoming of the new field of scholarship termed "Literacy Studies" (Barton 1994). Insights and methodologies come from several fields: education, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, history, etc. But probably there are not many attempts at listening to and analysing the message from the "horses' own
mouths". It seems to me that for any researcher seeking a better understanding of the role of literacy education in socio-economic development (not to say 'poverty reduction'), newly trained adult literates are the right horses to ride. Why, because it is they, who more than anybody else can give us deeper insights about the transition from a state of non-literacy to a state of literacy. The nature and results of this transition are important for an accurate and encompassing understanding of the role of literacy in the socio-economic improvement of a society, especially rural societies. And this fact is clearly contained in the above statements made by the new initiates themselves. An overview of these statements already gives us a clear trend: the transition is from a less desirable situation to a more desirable one. Participants are becoming better farmers, better traders, in short, functioning better as citizens of their environment, of the world. The result of the transition is one of change, positive change: a theme of liberation and development seems to be emerging from an observation of the nature and results of the transition.
Barton, David. 1994. Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. Blackwell, Oxford.
Bodomo, A. B. 1999. Defining Adult Education as a Tool for Development: Views from northern Ghana, CERC seminar paper, HKU, March 15, 1999