Guest blog written by William Beebe, Peter Jerry, Yoman Kumbu, Roselyn Mambu, Marsh Narawec, Emos Sibu Poirei
Literacy is the ability to read and comprehend things well so that the response, either through writing, speaking, or just listening, is understood by the audience. Illiteracy, on the other hand, is the absence of that ability, and 36.6% of PNG’s population is illiterate. That’s about 3, 780, 755 people. Illiteracy can impede development because people do not know enough to take part in decision-making or have a say in their rights. So how can we teach this group to read and comprehend things easily to contribute to the development of their societies and Papua New Guinea at large? Do we target every age group from the tip of the population pyramid to the youths and down to the children who form the widest base?
While we cannot address every age group, our focus is more on children. We believe that the answer to solving the illiteracy problem in our children lies in teaching English and imparting good values to children that are between the ages of 0 – 8 years old, as it is within that age range that much of the early childhood learning occurs and is cemented in a child for life. This is why Early Childhood Education (ECE) is a critical education sector that needs to be handled with care as it sets the course of a child’s destiny.
While the Education System in PNG takes care of 6, 7 and 8 years old in prep, Grade 1 and Grade 2, respectively, children ageing from 4 – 5 years old that are supposed to be in Kinder 1 and 2 are left out and taken care of by private institutions but not many children attend these schools. For example, in Wau-Waria District, there are about 9, 312 ECE age kids and only five private schools that teach Kinder 1 & 2 students. Most of these kids are found in the rural villages or in settlements, unattended to. Not only that, but there are also a lot of issues, such as huge number of student dropouts leading to an unemployment rate, law & order issues, etc. These are the people who were once children without proper ECE training.
We took up the PDIA Course to learn how to solve the problem in our local Wau Waria District. The Wau Waria District is the newest district established in Papua New Guinea in 2021. Our team comprised of our Local Member of Parliament who represents us at the National Level, a representative from the National Education Department who understands the national reform agenda on ECE, practitioners at the Provincial and District Levels, and a Community Ward Leader who is building a model ECE school in his ward. The makeup of our team allowed us to understand the problem in the district from different perspectives within our context.
Within the first several weeks, after so many attempts going back and forth each week to improve our problem statement, we finally came up with this: The absence of effective prioritisation and investment in Early Childhood Education (ECE) programs is contributing to a persistent low literacy rate among children in the Wau Waria District.
From there, we were able to refine our fishbone diagram to show some of the causes and sub-causes of what our problem is.
From doing Triple A analysis, we realized that we have a large change space in addressing Low Accessibility (C4) as bulldozers are already at work grading the roads into some of the remote areas of our District. Telecommunication work is also progressing well as Digicel now connects many people. That was the responsibility of Wau-Waria District Development Authority, and they are doing very well.
For us in this course, we identified Cause 3 as our responsibility to tackle, so we set our goal (bolded in the ECE Sector Plan snapshot below) to work on during this school holiday period in December.
Plans are now in place to conduct this ECE Awareness Exercise in all the Wards in the District, and we hope to build ECE Centers one ward at a time to offer ECE Programs to the children that are left unattended to.
There were many things learnt, one of them being the refining of our problem statement. We learnt that when we got our problem statement correct, it was easy for us to identify the causes and sub-causes of the problem. Branching them out using a fishbone diagram was the best thing we learned as we could clearly see the entry points for us to take action on.
We understand now that goals and objectives for a specific team we build must be centred around a root cause that we want to solve within a given timeframe. This understanding has helped us to develop our ECE Sector Plan, where goals and objectives for each root cause were established with strategies on how to achieve them. But instead of our Team tackling everything, we focused only on one root cause, which we believe is our responsibility to solve while other teams can achieve the rest, for example, Wau-Waria DDA. This motivated us to take steps forward during our iterations and get positive feedback from our Authorizers to assist us in our ECE Awareness Activity during the Christmas break.
There will be many teams involved in doing their part to solve this issue, and we see the need to build those teams through networking. But before we can do that, we will set up our structure (maybe do one Constitution again) with clear goals, create assignments and tasks, allocate clear executive timeline for these tasks, create budgets, assign responsibility to team members, provide resources and funding so that we can monitor progress and celebrate our achievements.
Now that we know how to construct our problem statement and deconstruct it down to entry points for actions, we are keen to solve other issues using those techniques. We will build teams strategically by utilising those with abilities for specific tasks so that there is trust among team members. We will also grow our authority through networking, value acceptance wherever we receive it and continue to grow our change space for easy intervention.
PDIA is about breaking a complex problem down to its root cause and identifying entry points to take action on; it requires teamwork. Build strategic teams by engaging those that can perform tasks as that can lessen your workload. As much as possible, utilise youths or young graduates as they catalyse change. They do not have many responsibilities, so tasks can be performed quickly and diligently. Train them if they don’t know and utilize them.
To conclude, illiteracy is an issue that needs everyone to work together to solve it. ECE Program has been identified to equip children to read and write well to be understood. With the tools gained from the PDIA Course, Team Erenge is looking forward to conducting an awareness exercise this Christmas with the intention of establishing ECE Centres in each ward to run ECE programs. It also stands prepared to build teams and network with others to see the illiteracy rate being reduced in Wau-Waria District and the nation of Papua New Guinea as a whole.
This blog was written by participants who completed a 12-week PDIA for PNG online action-learning program from August – December 2023. 36 participants successfully completed this program.