Kwale Collaborates With BTL To Implement Mother Tongue Education (MTE) Program.
The Kwale County Government is working with the Bible Translation and Literacy (BTL) organization to implement a mother tongue education (MTE) program during the foundational years of schooling.
The county department of education will work with the religious organization to create mother-tongue learning materials for the pre-primary level as part of the partnership.
Mother Tongue Education (MTE) is the provision of education in which the mother tongue is used as the language of instruction, but it does not preclude learning in a second or even third language.
The four-year partnership entails conducting baseline surveys, sensitizing key stakeholders to activities, developing mother-tongue learning materials for children, as well as monitoring and capacity building.
BTL is a faith-based nonprofit organization with the primary goal of developing small language groups in Kenya and beyond.
During the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), County Education Executive Mangale Ndegwa stated that collaboration is a significant step toward empowering future generations.
Ndegwa stated that education standards in the coastal county are still low, necessitating collaboration with various stakeholders.
“This is the way to go and as a devolved unit we are determined to inject adequate resources into the education sector for a better future for all,” he said.
Since 2013, the county government has built over 500 Early Childhood Education (ECD) centres across 20 wards in the four sub-counties of Matuga, Msambweni, Lunga Lunga, and Kinango, according to the education executive.
Ndegwa assured BTL that the county government is committed to promoting the partnership in order to expose young learners to their mother tongue as a medium of instruction.
Ndegwa assured BTL that the county government is committed to promoting the partnership in order to expose young learners to their mother tongue as a medium of instruction.
“As a county, we have hired 700 ECD teachers under permanent and pensionable terms and this partnership will ensure education in indigenous languages is entrenched,” Ndegwa said.
According to him, the county government launched the ‘Elimu ni Sasa’ education program in 2013, which has supported over 5,000 students in secondary school and over 3,000 students in colleges and universities.
Kwale County has set aside Sh400 million each fiscal year to carry out the education bursary policy.
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Ndegwa also mentioned that the county has begun a school feeding program at the pre-primary level, which has increased enrolment rates.
BTL has participated in the piloting of the Mother Tongue Education Program for indigenous languages, which focuses on the development of mother-tongue based school learning materials and capacity building for teachers from the Pokomo, Orma, Digo, and Duruma communities in Tana River and Kwale counties.
In Kwale, the organization has created mother-tongue school learning materials in the Digo language for grades one, two, and three.
It aims to equalize the educational levels of children in Kwale and Tana River counties with those of other children in the country by allowing them to learn in the language they understand best.
Rev. Peter Munguti, National Director of BTL, stated that the collaboration will improve education standards in the county.
Munguti added that the organization’s and counties’ collaboration is to ensure that the aspect of language development is fully implemented during early learning.
He believes that using mother tongues in lower primary schools should be encouraged by all, noting that it is a sound educational principle to progress from the familiar to the new.
The Ministry of Education is implementing the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC), which prioritizes mother tongue education for pre-primary school students.
The Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD) emphasized the importance of well-established mother tongue learning for pre-school levels in order to provide children with a solid foundation.
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Munguti revealed that his organization has created orthographies for more than twenty indigenous languages throughout the country. Orthography is a set of writing conventions that includes spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.
There may be differences in a language’s orthography, such as the difference between American and British spelling in the case of English orthography.
Kwale Collaborates With BTL To Implement Mother Tongue Education (MTE) Program
