AREAi reaches out-of-school children in IDP camps with ‘Fast Track' programme

Aid for Rural Education Access Initiative (AREAi) has equipped out-of-school children in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps in northern Nigeria with literacy and numeracy skills needed to transition the children back to formal education.

Gideon Seun Olanrewaju, the chief executive director, AREAi and Global Youth Ambassador for Theirworld, noted that the familiarisation visits to IDP Camps, a series of baseline assessments are carried out in each of the camps to assess and evaluate each child’s foundational capacities as this is a key component of the programme.

“This pre-intervention evaluation helps with the identification of individual beneficiary learning gaps, the learning category each child belongs to prior to implementation, and what learning groups they should be placed in for effective learning outcomes,” he said.

While conducting the baseline assessment Olanrewaju remarked, “relating with the students in their mother tongue language – Hausa is the best way in accessing them as it is the language they are most comfortable with.”

FastTrack combines three proven teaching and learning approaches: The Mavis Talking Book and Pen (a digital pen which, when it touches text or pictures in a specially-printed book, reads words and phrases out loud), Teaching-at-the-Right-Level methodology, and a dual language approach – using the indigenous language (Hausa) as a bridge to teach the English language.”