Launching on International Women’s Day, educational materials produced by The Open University (OU) for out-of-school Zimbabwean adolescent girls are being made freely available to educators worldwide.
The learning programme, developed by a team from the School of Education, Childhood, Youth and Sport at the OU, is helping over 12,000 girls and young women get back into education, onto formal training or to set up their own businesses. The programme supports development of foundational literacy and numeracy and early English skills and has been so successful that the materials will now be available on OpenLearn Create for the benefit of NGOs, governments and community educators around the globe.
Inspiring and aspiring
The OU team is academic lead for SAGE (Supporting Adolescent Girls’ Education), a £11.9m non-formal education project in Zimbabwe, which supports out-of-school adolescent girls aged 10-19 years. The project is led by Plan International and funded by the UK FCDO’s (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC) initiative.
“Stories within SAGE learning materials model diverse careers and this inspires girls to dream of new and brave aspirations”, says Plan UK Programme Manager, Caroline Dean. “SAGE seeks to work at multiple levels to promote and transform education for girls, by tackling the root causes of gendered barriers.”
SAGE learners have encountered various cultural and economic barriers preventing them from accessing their right to learn. This includes girls who have never been to school, have been to school and been unsuccessful, are young mothers, are from Apostolic communities and girls who have disabilities. Charlotte Chishava, SAGE National Coordinator, underlines the wider impact the programme has had for girls and young women in Zimbabwe;
“The SAGE materials have built a positive image for girls through showcasing the possible realisation of their career aspirations, in spite of the gender divide. The SAGE learning materials have made learning not just about literacy and numeracy but also about building agency.”
Accelerated learning worldwide
The materials now available on OpenLearn Create (OLC) provide educators with a range of materials to support learning for children and young people aged 10-19 years and for those working across Early Years to Grade 5 or those aged 11-12 years. There are learning resources covering Early Childhood Development to Grade 3 and materials covering Grade 3 to Grade 5 as well as beginner readers for Grades 1 to 5.
Professor Liz Chamberlain, OU Academic Director for SAGE, says,
“We are delighted that the SAGE girl-centred approach to learning has been so well-received resulting in vastly improved learning outcomes for girls and young women across 11 districts in Zimbabwe. Working with colleagues at OpenLearn Create, we have been able to make these resources freely available online and hope that educators around the world will be able to integrate them into their existing learning programmes.”
With SAGE materials now available worldwide, girls and boys globally will be able to access these engaging and inclusive learning tools. Kelly Worwood, Education Technical Advisor at Plan UK, joined in applauding the collaborative work;
“At Plan International we strive to lead the way on developing teaching and learning opportunities that enable the world’s most marginalised girls to access inclusive quality education. The work of the SAGE programme in Zimbabwe is an example of how we work with teams of leading national stakeholders and our learners themselves, to co-produce relevant, accessible and life changing materials. We are delighted that we are able to contribute to the sector’s growing body of open-source materials, in this case specifically those that can enable accelerated learning in literacy and numeracy for girls who have had very limited or no previous access to primary education.”
Access the SAGE learning materials, including an introductory screencast here.
The team have included a short survey on the OLC page to help them understand how and why practitioners across their different contexts use the resources.
You can read more about the goals of SAGE on the Girls Education Challenge site.
SAGE (Supporting Adolescent Girls’ Education) is a UKAid-funded programme through the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s (FCDO) Girls’ Education Challenge initiative led by Plan International and involving a consortium of partners, The Open University (OU), Christian Blind Mission (CBM), Apostolic Women’s Empowerment Trust (AWET), Econet and the Ministry of Primary & Secondary Education, Zimbabwe (MoPSE).
Sarah Jex is a Digital Content Officer in the Faculty of WELS, working with students and academics to tell stories of development, innovation and success. She began her career at the BBC and more recently has worked in marketing and communications in the independent school sector. ‘Off duty’ she enjoys photography, creative writing and trying to identify and nurture plants in the garden.
