Quality Education in Sierra Leone and Liberia

“I stay with my mother. She is a trader selling rice,” explains Umu, a student concluding the second year of her studies at Rising Academy Waterloo, in Western Freetown. “We wake at 4am early in the morning. When I get to the market, I help her to cook. After that, I get ready for school and after school, I go to the market again to help her sell. We get home around 8 or 9pm.”

Thanks to the support of Solon Foundation donors, Umu is one of 260 students—18% of total enrollment—that received need-based scholarships to attend a Rising Academy school in Sierra Leone this academic year. The majority of scholarship recipients (63%) are girls.

The story of Umu, who lives in a single parent home with three other sisters, is typical of the communities which Rising Academies serves. About 53% of scholarship students are from households with only one wage earner. Given the low level of educational attainment among caregivers—40% have never attended school—informal economic activities such as petty trade and stone mining are the main sources of income, which typically does not suffice to support their family let alone their children’s education. As a result, many students are at risk of having to join their parents or caregivers in their trade, potentially at the expense of their own education. Many insist that they would have dropped out of school were it not for the scholarship.

Umu says her favorite subjects are Mathematics and Science, and she has a dream for the future: “my plan is to become a medical doctor. I will be a doctor for people to get well. I want to help my mother not to suffer the way that she is right now, and I want to help my sisters for them to have education like me.” When asked about her experience at the Rising Academy school, she notes, “[the teachers] encourage us to learn. Even if we are wrong they still thank you [for participating]. They create a good learning environment, and treat us all equally.”

For Umu, however, the scholarship means a lot more than just access to a unique learning experience. “I have 3 sisters,” she tells me. “All of them got married at the age of 11 or 12 because they weren’t performing in school. If I am educated, I will be someone in the future. When a girl is educated, you have educated the world. Without education, I would have been married a long time ago.”

She’s grateful for that opportunity, and sees it as an incentive to strive for academic excellence. “Because of the scholarship, I come to school everyday, punctual and never absent,” Umu says. “I didn’t put my attention somewhere else; I put it only in education.”

Under the shade of the palm trees in the grounds of Rising Academy Juba, staff, students and parents sit in the late afternoon sun, transfixed by an effervescent figure in orange as he spins a yarn about a King, his daughter, and the tortoise who becomes her unlikely suitor.

The man’s name is Usifu Jalloh – aka “the Cowfoot Prince” – and he is a storyteller. Through stories, parables and music, he takes the audience on a spellbinding journey through the rich hinterland of Sierra Leone’s storytelling tradition.

It’s a tradition that is increasingly under threat from the homogenising forces of globalisation, but performers like Usifu Jalloh are helping to keep it alive and rekindle enthusiasm for the art of storytelling among a new generation.

For Rising Academies – a network of schools founded in Sierra Leone - this event gives students an opportunity to rediscover a vital part of their cultural inheritance that is in danger of being washed away.

Historically, one of the functions of storytelling was to transmit values from one generation to another. Usifu Jalloh is a master of this. For example, the moral of the story about the princess and the tortoise is the importance of grit and resilience, and knowing how to protect ourselves from the potentially negative influences in our lives. (The tortoise triumphs by managing to plough the king’s field while fending off attacks from a swarm of killer bees that do for his over-confident rivals.) For Rising Academies, an organisation which tries to put values at the heart of everything it does, making a connection to the moral threads running through these traditional stories makes obvious sense.

Finally, celebrating storytelling fits with Rising’s broader commitment to cultivating ‘oracy’ – the use of spoken language – as a skill every bit as important to life, citizenship and future employment as the ability to read and write. There are a range of ways in which Rising is trying to do this – both through a greater emphasis on purposeful student talk in lessons, and through specific opportunities for public speaking like weekly debates – but storytelling is an exciting element of this.

And the most important story Rising wants its students to be able to tell is the story of their own lives. As the Italian writer Gianni Rodari once put it, “Every possible use of words should be made available to every single person...Not because everyone should be an artist but because no one should be a slave.”