Enkisoma
Overview
In Maa, Enkisoma means “education.” We started The Enkisoma Project to aid with increasingly low literacy levels. We work with our women’s groups as well as primary school children to hold literacy trainings and improve reading and writing skills.
The Foundations
The main objective of the Enkisoma Program is increase literacy in our communities, especially among women and girls. We hold literacy sessions during women’s group meetings, where women practice their reading and writing skills. In additional to increasing literacy, we also aim to encourage more women to learn about accounting, and improve financial literacy to aid small business development. With an increase in literacy rates, women also gain more autonomy when it comes to business communication, signing loans, and starting businesses.
We also work to build pathways for effective communication between teachers, parents and students, and to enhance the literacy instruction in local primary schools. By enhancing professional development, increasing access to resources, and utilizing small study groups both in class and at home, we aim to increase students’ ability to accurately read, write and count.
Our Impact
Since we began the program, we have been able to meet many of our goals. We have improved the literacy rates of many of our beneficiaries, which has improved their entrepreneurship skills and amplified their income streams through business development. The program has also improved their ability to support their own children in grade school as they share their newly learned knowledge.
We have also worked with 224 students and held a total of 528 learning sessions. At the end of the year, we completed an assessment that determined that 205 out of the 224 pupils can now adequately read and write for their school levels (a rate of 92%). Through this project, we have also talked with 540 parents from four villages to emphasize girls’ education and parental engagement in children's education.
Throughout the year, we worked to increase parent engagement by holding five parent meetings with a total of 200 parents. We also worked with our women's groups to reach an additional 420 women to further this effort and better understand the challenges that students face while at home. Through these meetings, we found parental engagement to increase by 5%, as testified by teachers. In addition, we also developed literacy learning corners in two schools, provided 250 books, 53 studying d-lights, and 300 pens, pencils and exercise books to aid the program.
Future Plans
In the upcoming year, we aim to increase literacy levels with our current beneficiaries, in addition to expanding the program to work with even more students. We look forward to implementing additional literacy learning corners in other schools in the Monduli area.
