I hope everyone is doing well! We are continuing our adventure in Zambia this month and this week I wanted to highlight one of our most impactful and interesting programs to date – Read Smart Cinyanja! You may recall that I wrote about this program back in March when Katie and I observed it for the first time. Additionally, Read Smart was shortlisted for Global School’s Forums Impact @ Scale Labs as a top innovation to improve learning recovery in a post-COVID 19 learning environment.

In urban or peri-urban areas, students are exposed to print even if they don’t have books or reading materials in their home. They see street signs, store signs, grocery store labels, prices, and they start to make associations with those letters to how words are formed at an early age. In rural areas, like where we work in Zambia, there is an absolute lack of print that children can come across if they don’t have books or newspapers in their home – both of which are also harder to find in rural areas. So, when students are taught to read, they often have to rely on their memory rather than making connections between word sounds and letters.

The results of this approach have been disastrous. In Zambia, a recent assessment by USAID-funded Let’s Read Zambia shows that 70% of Grade 1-3 students performed at minimum or below minimum levels of proficiency in literacy. Globally, 250 million children are failing to acquire basic literacy skills. COVID-19 has exacerbated this crisis as students, especially those in grades one and two, have lost critical learning time where time would be spent building these literacy skills.

Enter Read Smart! Read Smart is an early grade literacy intervention that uses phonetic charts – essentially speech movement pictures that show the way the mouth moves to make certain sounds. It teaches letter sound-spelling relationships explicitly because students in rural contexts don’t have early exposure to print or see literacy in action. The program has four phases that take place over ten weeks each in grades one and two. I was able to observe a variety of phases across Joel and Kalowe Community School! It was inspiring to see kids in first and second grade effortlessly sounding out words and building their early literacy skills.

Importantly, standardized assessment data from the USAID-funded Let’s Read Zambia project allows us to compare how students participating in the Read Smart pilot are doing with a national dataset. Across the nation, the proportion of first grade students at “desirable” or “outstanding” levels was 32-34% at the end of 2021, compared to 75% at the pilot schools.

Data from Let’s Read Zambia Literacy Assessments for Grade 1, Term 3, 2021 – External Data

We are excited to be expanding the program in 2022 to serve eight schools and over 900 students in first and second grade! A special thanks goes to Ursula Rickli for working so closely with us to adapt the program; Isabelle Hürst for helping us to partner with Mrs. Rickli to adapt the materials to Cinyanja, and; Annabelle Hardy for her initial idea for a phonics pilot. You can read more about the program in our Practice Brief here.

-Reshma

Introducing, Read Smart Cinyanja!