Sankofa

Isolated, marginalized, impoverished, urban and rural communities far from the end of the dirt road in the less industrialized world, are forgotten. When Ray Larsen and Robin Podmore started Smart Village, they realized that electric light and facilities to charge a cell phone (should a signal be available) are transformational. They also understood that without the ability to read or write, these inhabitants have neither the means nor knowledge to communicate their needs or request the services that are rightfully theirs, so will never become truly self-empowered and prosperous. Today, illiteracy, lack of education, dwindling resources and infrastructure, corruption, and climate change all work to drive these communities further into isolation and impoverishment.

Inspired by the Aashraa Foundation Odisha’s vocational awareness program in the slums of Bhubaneswar, India, the Sankofa initiative has been established to initiate a dialog and develop pilot programs to bring STREAM (Science, Technology, Reading, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) to these forgotten communities. The group currently comprises members from 14 countries—India, the USA, Africa, and Europe organized into three working groups: curricula, documentation and communication, and implementation.

We are fortunate, that within the group, many are already teaching and have strong existing community connections. Based on the maxim “you don’t know until you try”, we intend to implement at least three pilot programs in three countries this year. From this learning, we will update our approach to implement five pilot programs next year to demonstrate that it is possible to engage, teach, and learn from the poorest of the poor. From this will emerge a set of guidelines to help others start their initiatives.

Our goal is to teach these illiterate, uneducated children the foundational concepts of STREAM through paths that resonate with their daily lives and cultural contexts and have a second-order impact on their families and their communities. Reflecting the essence of Sankofa, we honor the past by building on local knowledge and traditions, ensuring that our teaching is rooted in the cultural heritage of the communities we serve, enabling us to create a future where every child has the opportunity to succeed in STREAM fields, cognizant of their connection to culture and community.

Acknowledging the challenges of sustainability we commit to leveraging natural resources by integrating familiar elements from their surroundings, such as flora, fauna, water, food, and everything at hand and in everyday use into their lessons, developing human-created solutions that are both practical and impactful.

Basic science is introduced through observation of the naturally driven systems to hand such as the behavior of flora and fauna, other biological processes, heat transfer, precipitation and water flow. We connect these lessons to sanitary practices such as the importance of washing hands to prevent disease, understanding food chains and their impact on climate, and the creation of sanitary pads to improve menstrual health.
The fundamentals of technology come from observation of how natural and available elements, such as the connection of sticks, stones, and fibers solve practical problems that support human activities (e.g. levers, etc). In the longer term, through an immediate understanding of familiar activities, we introduce algorithmic literacy using community-specific routines such as fetching water to create instruction sets.

Without being able to read, children are limited to experiential learning—access to the written word provides unlimited learning.
The principles of civil and mechanical engineering arrive through activities like building sandcastles, playing with stones, diverting flowing water, rotary motion, and heat transfer, revealing the relationship between these basic processes and larger engineering concepts.

Culture is an art that sets the stage for these communities to teach the teachers, making the teachers embrace the dynamics of different cultures. Art will further enhance the embedded STREAM ideas through creative visualization.
We teach the language of mathematics through playing with numbers, geometries, shapes of natural elements, scales using rulers, basic proportions, calculation of time through the sun’s position, etc. Activities with more practical, immediate impact might encompass leveraging their experiences as street vendors or farmers to teach maths through practical applications that involve money and trade. This practical knowledge will provide the foundation for more advanced arithmetic and mathematical concepts in the future.

We are fortunate to work with and learn from the Aashraa Foundation which has implemented such a vocational awareness program in Bhubaneswar. Many of these families are daily workers, spending over half of their income on rent, leaving them little for food and other needs, without the services we take for granted such as potable water, toilets, and electricity. Additionally, these communities face serious intrinsic problems, such as drug abuse, alcohol issues, domestic violence, and child labor. More than 70% of the women around 40 years old are illiterate widows. Many parents take no responsibility for their children's education, regarding them as a source of income—consequently, children often feel that education is unimportant and see no future.

To reach a position from which they could start teaching these families, the Aashraa Foundation spent two years building trust with the community sufficient to establish a “school”. They introduced weekly nutrition kits to help children get the food they needed, strengthening the relationship with their families. They organized quarterly health camps, providing free medicine where needed.

With the essentials in place, the Foundation was able to open an informal education center to encourage families to send their children to learn. Through games and fun activities to get kids excited about coming to school, they teach using methods that don’t require electricity or expensive tools. They invite local heroes to share their stories so inspiring the children.

Recognizing the importance of aligning our efforts with broader educational standards, through collaboration with education experts and learning from the available literature, we will ensure that our curriculum not only meets local needs, as defined in agreement with the target communities and their representatives but also fits into the larger educational framework. This alignment will help us measure progress effectively and ensure our students meet global education standards.

Finally, it should not be forgotten that we have a great deal to learn from these same communities: resilience in the face of extreme poverty, how to really live with the land, and some small insight into a wealth of traditional environmental knowledge (TEK).