Street Child’s Director of Africa Programs Megan Lees-McCowan shares reflections from a recent visit to Somaliland, where teachers are adopting a new, child-centered approach to learning.

When we visited the elementary school in Gebiley, Somaliland, one room was full to bursting with cardboard flashcards, number gardens made of popsicle sticks and other locally-made learning materials.

Amal’s flair for creating exciting learning resources from scraps and trash is no accident. Amal is one of Street Child’s leading teacher trainers in Somaliland, and she has an autistic son. She explained to me that his needs and preferences for visual and tactile learning meant that she was used to going the extra mile to teach him to read, write and count.

Now, she is inspiring and training elementary teachers across Somaliland to do the same, as part of Street Child’s education program in partnership with the Ministry of Education and UNICEF.

Crafting and play are tried and tested educational methods for young children in many countries, but they are not common in Somaliland. But engaging, low-cost and home-grown strategies for teaching foundational literacy and numeracy to elementary age children are of enormous relevance to Somaliland's children.

Somaliland is a largely peaceful but extremely resource-constrained and climate-change affected de facto state in the Horn of Africa, that declared independence from the larger and highly conflict-affected country of Somalia in 1991.

Two-thirds of elementary age children in the country were estimated to be out of school in 2021, in large part due to household poverty, underinvestment in education and lack of provision or value for education among rural populations and in particular nomadic pastoralists.

Those in school were not learning to read and write, with fewer than one-third of children in Grade 3 able to read a simple story.

Amal used to attend the New Gebiley Elementary School where she now trains teachers; back then the dominant mode of teaching was ‘chalk and talk’ a directive, repetition-based, teacher-centered approach.

This is still dominant in many of Somaliland’s elementary schools, and is one of the main barriers to children’s active learning. But in New Gebiley that is changing. Amal trains teachers to use a different approach, one that is child-centered, play-based and groups children by their literacy and numeracy level, rather than their age.

Called Teaching at the Right Level, or TaRL, this approach was first tested and scaled by the Indian NGO Pratham, with rapid and dramatic positive impact on foundational skills. Street Child has helped to adapt this for the Somaliland context, piloting the method across 60 grade 3 classes in public elementary schools.

The results have been highly significant: after just 9 months of using this methodology in Somaliland, the proportion of children able to read a simple story jumped from 33% to 75% and the proportion of children able to do multiplication and division went from 12% to 50%.

There is significant gender inequality in Somaliland; a 2019 study found that women have fewer than half the opportunities of men in educational attainment, economic opportunity and political participation.

I heard many anecdotes that only underlined the persistence of gender barriers in Somaliland today.

But I also met Hayaat, a math teacher in New Gebiley. When we asked Hayaat about the performance of her female students, she told us they were performing even better than the boys.

Why, we speculated? Perhaps because of their positive female role model, leading the class in a fun, engaging and child-centered way!