A TOTAL of 1,032 Guyana Online Academy of Learning (GOAL) scholarship awardees will receive training and participate in the Ministry of Education’s National Literacy Volunteer Mentorship Programme.

According to a post made on Facebook by GOAL, the awardees will undergo a three-day training to provide the requisite skills and competencies needed to deliver the programme. This mentorship programme will commence in January 2023.

“GOAL reminds awardees that community service is empowering, as it connects awardees to the community as a means of motivating and transferring knowledge to others, either through mentoring or community projects,” the post stated.

GOAL scholarships are free of cost but awardees are encouraged to participate in volunteer activities to aid Guyana’s development.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Education’s National Literacy Department, in October, first launched a three-day training workshop, the National Literacy Volunteer Conference at the Ramada Princess Hotel at Providence, East Bank Demerara (EBD). This programme saw 132 persons from throughout the country being equipped with the skills needed to aid citizens to acquire functional literacy skills.

An assessment was conducted earlier in the year whereby over 600 children and their parents gathered to assess what skills learners had, as they were preparing to return to school after the schools were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This assessment proved that children needed additional support in all areas.

Assistant Chief Education Officer with responsibility for Literacy, Samantha Williams, speaking at the launch said that pre-COVID evidence suggests that more than half of the world’s population of children were not acquiring basic skills in reading and math and had very low literacy levels.

“The National Literacy Department of the Ministry of Education is delivering on one of the promises made by our minister. We are happy to say that we will be training approximately 132 volunteers who will join the fight with us to aggressively work to eliminate illiteracy,” she said.

This volunteer programme will help to concretize the level of support that can be given to students through intervention.

She also added that the volunteer programme was part of a broader national rollout as they partnered with GOAL to provide training for all awardees who are interested in becoming volunteers.

“As you may be aware, persons who were awarded scholarships have to do community service. So, we are teaming up with GOAL to ensure that the community service that persons do would be to support literacy,” she said in October.

Williams added: “So we are going to train the awardees and they are going to become literacy educators in the same way that you will become literacy educators and they are going to contribute as well to the changes that we will see in another couple of years.”

She said that by the end of the training, they want volunteers to leave with general, broad ideas, such as knowing how to execute the reading programme and being able to assess where students are, as well as understand the importance of ensuring that learners acquire literacy skills.

“So, a part of this programme is not just based on getting them to become good readers, but [also] generally getting them to become better citizens. So, we’re going to focus on those virtues and values that we need to transmit and inculcate,” she said.