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Communities in Action: The Participation of Communities in Two South African Literacy Campaigns

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Handbook of Quality of Life in African Societies

Part of the book series: International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life ((IHQL))

Abstract

This chapter describes two national literacy initiatives to illustrate the way in which literacy interventions can contribute to the enhancement of the quality of life of vulnerable communities. Using a mixed methods research approach, it explores two adult literacy campaigns (the South African Literacy Initiative and the Kha Ri Gude Mass Literacy Campaign) implemented in South Africa and highlights how they targeted their interventions in order to impact positively on the quality of life of the learners, their families and their communities. Written from an insider perspective this chapter outlines the features that contributed to enabling illiterate adults to address some of the many challenges they faced. The author outlines the background to the Kha Ri Gude campaign (which found its roots in the earlier South African Literacy Initiative) and focuses on how the two campaigns jointly impacted on and benefitted the lives of nearly five million learners, their families and communities. The author argues that the social capital and the web of interconnections emerging from the social movement context of the literacy campaigns, this she argues provided a network of agency and resilience to the desperateness faced by communities.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Kha Ri Gude is Tshivenda for “Let us learn.” It was decided to use the Tshivenda terminology as a way of accentuating the minority status of the language.

  2. 2.

    The Kha Ri Gude campaign has won a number of awards, including the Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB) award in 2010, for the excellence of the campaign materials in all 11 official languages; the Government Communication and Information System’s Umbungsweti Award (in 2009) for the campaign’s developmental communication strategy reaching adults in the most remote and impoverished sites and its efforts to include deaf and blind learners and the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) award (in 2012) for its effective delivery to the poor. In 2016, the International UNESCO Confucius Prize for Literacy for its well-developed campaign that applied scientific research on how illiterate adults read.

  3. 3.

    The curriculum included mother tongue literacy, English as a first additional language and numeracy. The life skills component was developed via the thematic approach. The themes utilised for the campaign were as follows: I am learning; My family, my home; Living together; Healthy living; World of work; Our country; The world around us.

  4. 4.

    These may include constitutional rights, human rights, balloting, regular elections, and the availability of social services.

  5. 5.

    The educators in the campaign were organised into groups of 10, which functioned as communities of practice groups where educators shared problems and solutions. They were required to maintain journals, which they discussed at their meetings. The process is fully discussed in McKay (2017).

  6. 6.

    The LAPs contained 10 assessment activities for Literacy and 10 for Numeracy, which learners completed at various stages in their programme. At the end of the learning programme the educator administered a survey of 24 items. Learners were required to indicate which items resonated with their perception of the impact of the learning on various areas of their lives. The LAPs provided biographical information on the learners, for example, age, home language, type of residential area (informal settlement, village (as indicated in Fig. 2.2), prior learning, employment status and gender.

  7. 7.

    The Kha Ri Gude campaign reached 4,386,251 learners in the period 2008–2017. The year 2011 was selected for this study as a stable year with the campaign having overcome initial teething problems or being busy winding down issues, thus providing more reliable data.

  8. 8.

    Dale and Newman (2006, p. 19) and Boughton (2016) caution that communities with few economic resources find it difficult to effectively create change within their neighbourhoods. For any action to occur, communities needed to have networks of social capital in place that could mobilise for change, with critical mass being critical for enabling change at a larger scale.

  9. 9.

    SANLI utilised a scaled down version of this organisational structure.

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  1. University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa

    Veronica McKay

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  1. Faculty of Education, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

    Irma Eloff

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McKay, V. (2019). Communities in Action: The Participation of Communities in Two South African Literacy Campaigns. In: Eloff, I. (eds) Handbook of Quality of Life in African Societies. International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15367-0_2

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