Early Childhood Development and Learning Expanding Access to High-Quality Education
“We must not settle for low-quality education in low-resource settings. Indeed, where resources are least, education can have its greatest impact.”
Early high-quality educational opportunities are the building blocks of a better life. But where classrooms, qualified teachers, and learning materials are scarce, can children still receive the education they deserve?
In 2015, EDC responded with a resounding “yes.”
In Rwanda, EDC supported a countrywide educational reform effort (using EDC’s Read Right Now! early literacy framework) through the USAID-funded Literacy, Language, and Learning (L3) project. The project includes the development of teaching and learning materials in Kinyarwanda and English, improvements to teacher training, the creation of community libraries, and civic events that celebrate reading and writing.
EDC also remained committed to interactive audio instruction (IAI) as an essential tool for delivering education and teacher training. Based on our extensive IAI work in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, we published Expanding Access to Early Childhood Development Using Interactive Audio Instruction. This toolkit helps practitioners around the world learn how to build sustainable, high-quality programs even in challenging contexts.
FY 2015
Key Project Milestones
- More than 9 million L3 materials are distributed to all 2,467 public primary schools in Rwanda, reaching more than 1 million students.
- Evaluations of EDC’s Read Right Now! program show that the RRN! approach has helped early-grade students in resource-lean contexts make significant progress in acquiring reading skills.
- A post-project evaluation of EDC’s early childhood interactive radio instruction programs in Zanzibar finds lasting gains and that program models have been institutionalized within Zanzibar’s Ministry of Education.