We are a small part in another child’s big dreams – the ALiVE e…

I travelled to Taveta to monitor the Assessment of Life Skills and Values in East Africa (ALiVE). This was after a three-day intensive volunteer training at St. Mary’s Teachers’ Training College in Bura, Taita. I began monitoring duties on the field as soon as I arrived in Taveta. But it was not until later in the afternoon that I encountered an interesting scenario. I met two volunteers who were conducting the assessment at Luduwai, an enumeration area (EA) in Taveta. The adolescent boy’s mother was doing her chores while her son responded to one of the volunteers. The other volunteer was taking notes on what the boy was saying. It was important for them to accurately capture his responses to the scenarios in the assessment.

When the boy was given a short story to read during the assessment, he held the laminated sheet of paper and asked in Swahili,

“Is this English?” “Yes,” the volunteer replied. “I don’t know how to read English,” he answered, as he returned the paper.

The fact that he didn’t even try was surprising. Several of his peers struggled to read the same passage in the households I monitored, but they tried. Nonetheless, it revealed how much he may have struggled to the point of quitting. To me, this simply emphasised the question that the PAL Network Citizen-led Assessments have always posed: “Are our children learning?” It also shows that we still have a long way to go before every child has acquired foundational literacy and numeracy skills.

I had another unique experience in Taveta’s most remote enumeration area, Ulawani. It took an hour to get there on a motorcycle; a car would be slower on that terrain. The ride was rough, but the breath taking view of the semi-arid land stretching towards Mount Kilimanjaro on the horizon compensated for the trouble. I met two volunteers, Peter and Teresa, who were on their way to a household. We entered the compound of a listed household, the first we had seen after a long walk. At a distance, some young men were ploughing the dusty ground in the hope of rain. The clear skies, however, seemed to be laughing at them. It didn’t rain recently and didn’t seem to be coming soon.

A mother welcomes us to her home, guides us to a nearby tree and offers us seats. She then briefly leaves and returns with her two adolescent sons, who were among the men ploughing earlier. The volunteers had already introduced themselves, so they proceeded to record the household information from the mother before noting down James and Juma’s details (not their real names). After the exchange, they tell Juma he will be assessed after James and ask him to wait in the shade cast by the adjacent hut. When the volunteers finished assessing James, Juma was missing. He’d vanished into the bushes. The mother goes looking for him.

The village elder breaks the ice after a brief moment of confusion. He tells us that Juma dropped out of school. He went on to say that while Juma was giving us his information, he had lied when he said he was in form 2. That is when we got a sense of what was going on. According to the village elder, like Juma, many boys in the area often drop out of school. They see no reason to attend school when they can ride a bodaboda (public service motorcycle) and raise a family like the riders they see around them. They would rather work than attend school so they can help educate their sisters and support their parents.

During this intriguing moment, I looked around and couldn’t find anything that would remotely inspire young people in the area to want better things in life. I couldn’t find a large, beautifully constructed concrete house like those seen in some villages, which might be an inspiration. There is not even a tarmacked road to get to the area in the first place. It felt like they did not understand the value of education because they did not see examples of people who have succeeded through education. It was as if they were living in another era and had no idea what was going on in the world.

The village elder continues to say the adolescents are also raised by parents who are trying to educate them but are uneducated themselves. So, they can easily let them drop out of school because they lack the resources and awareness to keep them in school. They see how their parents raised them despite the difficulties and believe their children can ride the same tide. They don’t seem to know that their children have potential to be better through education.

This experience shows why assessments like AliVE are essential in elevating discussions about life skills, values and education to the forefront. They help paint a picture of a community’s situation, and how it could affect their future. That is how we get to be a small part of making every child’s dream come true. Even if they do not yet have a dream, we can show them the possibilities of what their aspirations could be.

In early 2018, the Values and Life Skills (VaLi) thematic cluster of the Regional Education Learning Initiative (RELI) identified the need to strengthen, integrate and develop 21st Century skills among young people. The aim of these skills is to help young people adapt to the fast pace of change in the 21st Century. RELI members committed to experimenting with what works in nurturing these 21st Century values and life skills. They developed a context-relevant assessment to establish the state of life skills and values among adolescents, share lessons and inform system change across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zanzibar.

In April 2022, Kenya was the first country out of those conducting ALiVE to do the assessment. The assessment was carried out in 20 of Kenya’s 47 counties across 800 Enumeration Areas (EAs), each EA covered by two volunteers. It targeted adolescents between 13 and 17, both in and out of school. The first round of the ALiVE assessment focused on three life skills: problem solving, self-awareness, collaboration and one value: respect. The main difference between the two is that life skills can be taught, whereas values are nurtured. The ALiVE assessment findings will be used to inform policymakers, teachers, parents and adolescents about the importance of life skills and values. They will also help establish an East African community of knowledge and practice, as well as strengthen the capacities of experts.