The note examines the practical, and literate skills that students acquire at different levels in West African Koranic schools. It is a long-standing parallel system of education, yet, relatively unknown to development planers, thus seldom taken into explicit account in their policies, and...

The note reviews the efforts begun in 1979 by an illiterate farmer from Nwodua, Ghana, to bring instruction in the ways of a modern society to his community. The success led to further opportunities in functional literacy, and soon a full scale adult primary school was opened, which became the...

Nomgana is the hub community of a very active inter-village federation in Burkina Faso. In recent years, a local association called Manegbzanga has launched an experimental program using Moore language literacy as the basis for learning French. The program achieved a good deal of success and was...