Ms Elizabeth Boakye-Yiadom, a 17-year-old Ghanaian-American high school student and a Sunday School Teaching Assistant at the All Nations United Methodist Church in Charlotte, has launched a project dubbed Read-To-Excel and a reading laboratory. The project, which is being rolled out at Pepease Presbyterian Basic School in Kwahu Pepease, is designed to equip students in underserved communities. It is expected to be incorporated into the church Sunday School to enhance the reading skills of children as they live out their God-given gifts and become loyal and faithful citizens of the church and country. The Read-to-Excel project offers a combination of audiovisual technology and books to improve learning methods and instruction for students. It also aims to support and promote the Readers Club in schools. Ms Elizabeth Boakye-Yiadom’s father, Rev. Dr Emmanuel Boakye-Yiadom, explained that Ms Boakye-Yiadom’s observations of inadequate reading and mathematical skills among pre-college students in underserved communities during her visit to Ghana had an impact on the decision. She decided to start this project because of the circumstances she saw in underprivileged areas of Ghana during her visit. UNICEF 2020 MICS-EAGLE Ghana Education report shows that ‘only seven per cent of children in Grade three had the expected reading skills for that grade, while eight per cent of children have the expected numeracy skills.’ Rev. Boakye-Yiadom explained that with the realisation of literary challenges among school-going children in Ghana and minority communities in the USA, she decided to launch the project to enable students and children to become proficient in reading and mathematics. To make this project sustainable, she said, she had created an Amazon wish list to allow the community to support this endeavour and make a presentation on the project to the All Nations United Methodist Church in Charlotte, USA, to promote church participation. The items provided to the Pepease Presbyterian Basic School included a computer laptop, projector, projector screen, headphones, DVDs or CDs for audiovisual instruction in English and mathematics, books, and Christian literature. Rev. Boakye-Yiadom called on other philanthropists and natives of Kwahu to emulate the kind gesture and promised to extend the project to other schools in hard-to-reach areas. Madam Irene Djabakuor Djorbuah, the head of the school, who received the keys, lauded the team for the project and promised to maintain the items for the betterment of the students. She was hopeful that with the provision of the reading laboratory, students would improve their vocabulary and skills.
Source: Ghana News Agency