Challenges offer chances, Alternative learning in rural Nigeria
By Odunayo Aliu, a 2018 kanthari graduate and founder of Bramble.
Somewhere in a village, in the middle of a thick forest, young girls and boys experience learning by playing with wood, insects, plastic waste and whatever they can lay their hands on. They watch explanatory and DIY videos, interact with and ask adults for help and raise questions on anything that they are curious about. As you can guess, they are curious about a lot of things! This is a tiny picture of what happens at Bramble Learning Space, located in Arikanki village, Akinyele LGA, Ibadan, Nigeria.
Exactly one year ago, there was no school or any learning facility in this village. I moved her on the 4th of August 2019, and we opened the learning space in mid September. Arikanki is in the middle of thousands of cherry trees. If you visit during their fruiting season (November through February), you will find the fruits very tasty. For a very long time, two of these trees were our major classroom, and even now they are still our favorites spots. It is however sad, that every day you will hear the sound of chainsaws cutting down the trees in their numbers.
The parents of our learners are actively involved in our activities. When we decided to build a classroom using pet-bottles, they gladly joined the experiment. To give strength to each bottle we fill them with earth.
They mobilized other members of the community to assist in this bottle filling process.
They also participate in knowledge sharing sessions/programs, in feedback and assessments. Arikanki is a farming community and our children are well experienced. One day, two of the learners brought some seeds to plant and we all decided to make a garden and vegetable beds. That was how we started growing some food at the learning space. Parents give seeds to plant, share their tools with us and supervise the gardening and other activities whenever necessary.
During Covid-19, nothing much has changed in the community’s routine; people going to farms two to three times daily, social interaction without nose mask, face shield or physical distancing. However, for children, young people who were able to walk the one and half hour distance to the nearest private schools, everything has changed. This has placed much pressure on Bramble as many parents from the five village communities around us are now requesting to enroll their children in the learning space.
In response to this, Bramble launched an Accelerated Learning Program which will allow us to engage with more children and young people during weekends. We also made a schedule to allow us to enroll more children into our fulltime program. At the onset of Covid-19, we had only nine fulltime learners, but now, we are taking the number to 30! We are also going to reach about forty more learners through the Accelerated Learning Program.
A positive side-effect of the Covid Pandemic, seems to be that alternative learning gets a chance!
more about Bramble at: http://www.bramblenetwork.org/