One of the most difficult things about doing work in far-flung and poor communities is getting enough workers to go out and stay the course. When Goducate was faced with a community of hundreds of thousands of people in Sabah with no access to state education, the thought of finding enough teachers to educate the children there was mind boggling. But we realised that the mothers who had had some education could be trained to teach the children literacy and numeracy. In the past 3 years we have opened 24 literacy centers staffed by nearly 60 teachers and assistant teachers. The teachers meet every every month and undergo periodic re-training and upgrading. Well over 1000 students have passed through those centers. Some have been able to find work outside, while some have stayed on as assistant teachers.
A literacy center that has been operating for the past 6 years in another part of Sabah, about 5 hours’ drive away from where we are operating, heard about how we trained mums to be teachers and invited us to share our system and our curriculum, to help them expand their work.
About 2 months ago, when I brought our team of our supervisor, two teachers, and our transport manager to help them, there were 10 trainees waiting for us. Some of them had been teachers in the Philippines. The rest, who were teenagers and mothers who had had some education, were very nervous because they thought that trainees had to be highly educated people. But when they learnt that two of our teachers were mums-turned-teachers, and one was a teenager who was a student-turned-teacher, they relaxed and were able to take part fully in the training, and to ask questions freely during the discussion time.
From the updates that we have received from that center, our system and our curriculum are being implemented by them smoothly.
