How low-cost, locally driven innovation can support literacy education during crises

In 2024–2025, Canadian NGO CODE’s Teaching and Learning in Fragile Contexts Project (2021-2026) awarded 20 research grants to African academics to conduct locally-led studies on literacy education in crisis settings. This research generated practical, transferable evidence from fragile contexts across sub-Saharan Africa. The overall aim was to improve literacy and learning outcomes for children in refugee and internally displaced person (IDP) communities, with particular attention to gender equality and inclusion. The new evidence generated through these grants mostly falls under five broad topics: 

1. Teaching innovations [link to research summary to be added]
2. Trauma-informed pedagogy 
3. Digital tools 
4. Play-based learning
5. Teacher experiences

Here is a sample of research into four affordable teaching innovations - findings that suggest that improving literacy doesn’t always require lengthy or expensive interventions. 

Student reading scores can be improved by short, targeted teacher training

Schools serving refugee and IDP children are often staffed by under-trained teachers. Despite their commitment, such teachers may have a poor knowledge of foundational literacy instruction, including phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Research by Professor Gabriel Egbe’s team at Veritas University, in Abuja, Nigeria found that a five-day intensive training on sound recognition and manipulation combined with training on offering psychosocial support, demonstrably improved teaching in a non-government school run by IDPs. After the teachers were trained:

• Across all grade levels, pupils exhibited statistically significant and educationally meaningful improvements in phonological awareness 
• Phoneme isolation and phoneme manipulation showed the highest gains indicating strengthened capacity to recognize and modify individual sound units which is a foundational component of early decoding skills.
• Both boys and girls demonstrated similar progress. 

Recommendation: Strengthen universal early literacy interventions through teaching phonological awareness, developing local materials, and providing professional development for teachers to impact quality education in IDP schools.

Caveat: Pupils in IDP schools can only access quality education if their psycho-social needs such as food, teaching and learning resources, and  teacher professional development are met and addressed.

Children learn better when teachers build on student’s home language

Multi-lingual classrooms are almost a given in refugee and IDP schools, and many students are learning in a new language. Translanguaging is a teaching approach that leverages home languages to scaffold learners into official school languages and allows them to use both languages as they learn. When Prof Columba Muringui’s team introduced a simple Translanguaging Instructional Module to help teachers in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya adapt their reading lessons to incorporate multiple languages, student’s reading comprehension improved. When teachers implemented the module, they found that:

• Teachers don’t need to understand the learners’ home language to make use of the Translanguaging Instructional Approach in class. 
• Students working together in same-language groups co-created meaning from the text, using all the languages they knew.
• Students showed more confidence and were livelier and more relaxed in class because they could use their home language.
• Both girls and boys benefited similarly.

Recommendations: Governments and NGOs should allow children to use their home languages in early grades. This helps them feel included and makes learning easier, especially for refugee children. 

Caveats: Lessons may take longer to plan and teaching materials in multiple languages may be needed. Managing a multilingual classroom requires careful organization.

A low-cost improvised mobile science kit enhanced learning outcomes

Access to science equipment is very limited in schools in crisis contexts, making it difficult to provide engaging science classes. Also working in Kakuma, Kenya, Prof. Ezekiel Owenga’s team developed an improvised Mobile Science Kit that helped teachers creatively use locally available materials in their classrooms. Students who were taught using the mobile science kit had better learning outcomes than those whose teacher didn’t have the kit.

• Teachers using the kits became more creative in their teaching methods
• The kits enhanced practical skills and problem-solving abilities in learners
• The kits improved learners’ understanding, interest and confidence in integrated science.
• The kits promoted gender equity in terms of access, participation and learner engagement.

Recommendation: Education providers should make the small investment in science equipment made from local materials to help learners in crisis situations master science subjects.

Caveats: Some teachers had challenges using the improvised mobile science kit, depending on their preparedness, training and support, resource availability, class size, time constraints, storage of materials, and material replacement.

Flexible, community-driven education is vital during ongoing conflicts

Dr. Wisdom Agbevanu’s team from the University of Cape Coast looked at how ongoing violent conflict undermined access to good quality literacy education in northern Ghana due to school closures and abrupt lesson interruptions. The conflict caused psychological distress, resource scarcity, and exacerbated socio-economic inequality. However, the found that teachers and communities find ways to keep learning going.

• Teachers adapted their teaching methods by extending contact hours, decentralising and supporting home-based learning. They also employed protective classroom practices, technology, and cultural/spiritual coping to sustain literacy.  
• Communities got involved by mobilizing the parent-teacher groups, collaborating with community leaders/local authorities, recruiting volunteer teachers, and providing moral and emotional leadership.  
• Sensitive approaches to professional development and Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) helped teachers keep some control and innovate, building their emotional resilience and accountability despite conflict conditions.  

Recommendation: Education stakeholders should support teacher’s Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), even where conflicts create challenges, as they play a valuable role in helping teachers respond creatively to conflict situations.

Caveats: Notwithstanding the benefits of professional development, the conflict severely restricted its frequency and scope, which limits sustained capacity building.

Download the policy briefs and full reports behind this research, and other research funded through the TLFC project at:  https://code.ngo/tlfcresearch.

Register for an INEE webinar discussion of these findings at: registration link

Research funded through TLFC was carried out with the aid of a grant from Global Affairs Canada. The views expressed in this work are those of the creators and do not necessarily represent those of CODE, Global Affairs Canada (GAC) or the Government of Canada.