Please help us get Africa reading - by improving the skills of a new teacher 

1. What's our mission?

Phonics by Phone trains teachers to teach reading using the mobile phone that's already in their pocket.  We need your money and your time to support this network of motivated teachers in remote villages in Ghana.

2. What's in it for you? 

• If you wish, you'll connect directly with a highly committed teacher who is close to qualifying. Share in their struggles and successes. Experience one-to-one the life of a young man or woman who has volunteered in very tough circumstances to educate their entire community. Establishing a personal connection like this, across continents, is a rare privilege - you have something unique to give, but also to gain, from it!
• You'll help us achieve a miracle - reading success for huge numbers of children in Ghana. If properly taught using phonics, all these children will learn to read and write well, rather than drop out of school early.

3. How does it work?

4. What's phonics?

There is plenty of evidence proving that phonics is by far the best way to teach children to read and write.  Phonics means using the sound of each letter and combination of letters, not the name.  It's the code that transforms strings of letters into words and sentences. Children learn to blend and segment sounds and become confident readers.   You are reading this - obviously you can read. Just imagine life if you couldn't!  Sadly, phonics is not yet well understood in Ghana - but the teachers are very receptive, so we know it will work on a larger scale.  Once most early-grade teachers in Ghana use this approach, literacy rates could soar to levels comparable with those in developed countries.  You can get our course on your own phone, just as the teachers in Ghana do, by clicking on this link.  It  comprises 100 lessons based on Debbie Hepplewhite's work published by Phonics International. We have a sister website for supporting graphics and teaching materials here.

5.  Why reading matters

Ghana has made good economic progress in recent years but the benefits are not evenly spread. Remote communities are very poor - most adults live on less than $1.50 a day, putting them within the UN definition of extreme poverty. Children can only break out of this cycle of deprivation if they get a good education.  Most children do go to school regularly but class sizes are very large and teacher training is inadequate. Currently, only 2% of children aged 8 or 9 attending state schools can read fluently - the equivalent figure in rich countries is over 85%. 

6.  500 teachers signed up already

Across these deprived districts, thousands of community volunteers have stepped forward to become teachers. They are being trained to a full qualification through distance learning and will qualify in July 2016.  But their training includes only a few hours on how to teach reading. To supplement this we have created a systematic course in phonics, available free to download on a mobile phone. We have enabled teachers to access the course free - no fees, and no airtime charges - on the phone they already have.  There are excellent phone networks all over Ghana.  We have purchased SD memory cards (2GB  capacity) which we make available to our signed-up teachers at low cost.  Thus every teacher in the country can access the course.  So far 500 teachers have signed up and another 250 are in the pipeline; we expect to grow this number further.

7.  What do we need the money for?

8. What do we need your time for? 

We'd love to hook you up with one of our Ghana teachers  - via email or better still via the secure Private Messaging system on our website, which the teachers can access free on their phone.  (It's your choice, of course, but our teachers really thirst for this kind of pen-pal contact, whether or not you are a teacher yourself.)  You can meet the teachers in advance by hovering your mouse over each pin on this map