Literacy & Life Skills
Equipping for the future
Our Life Skills program seeks to empower literacy tutors with skills in kitchen gardening and poultry production. Through the training and gifting of poultry by Mercy, inc. we are witnessing poverty alleviation through improved agricultural practice and the resulting income generation through sales of eggs, poultry, and vegetables.
Train up a child in the way he should go;
even when he is old he will not depart from it.
Proverbs 22:6
Cause Overview
There are an estimated 773 million adults and youth illiterate worldwide (UNESCO, 2020). Our literacy and life skills program seeks to open the world’s most widely read book, the Bible, and other functional texts to new readers around the world.
We offer free literacy tutoring through local churches that are associated with the Village Church Planting program of One Mission Society. We have launched programs in fourteen countries. The classes are open to church members and the surrounding community so that they may learn to read in the language they speak and use with ease. Instruction in Bridge to Reading programs utilizes story-telling approaches and use of existing literacy primers in local languages.
Families of adults who can read and understand functional texts in health and agriculture live fulfilled lives because they can access life-changing information. Studies have shown that farmers who can read produced better harvests than their illiterate counterparts. Similarly, mortality rates for infants are also lower among literate mothers compared to mothers who cannot read. Regarding learning to read for the first time a student said
“We have lived in darkness all our lives long up to this day … had been humiliated and could not respond because we were limited (illiterate). But now, today, we have begun to put an end to all that. We have begun to read and write; we are becoming like others.”
You may partner with us by contributing towards supporting a literacy trainer, costs of a literacy training seminar, provision of teaching and learning supplies, and our poultry training program.
Chalk Board and Training
- Support a literacy coordinator for any one of the five regions (Central, East, South, Mid-West and Far West) Africa. A monthly budget of $350 provides a stipend and transportation for a trainer who visits and encourages literacy tutors and learners.
- Support a tutor training seminar in a new country. $3,000 to train literacy tutors/trainers in a five-day residential seminar.
- Provide Teaching and Learning Supplies. We currently have more than 2000 students across fourteen countries.
- Your gift of $25 provides teaching and learning supplies for two students.
- Your gift of $50 provides a large-size chalkboard and chalk to learning centers.
- Our Hens and Roosters project provides training on raising poultry and gifts trainers with 5 hens and a rooster together with poultry feeds. Your gift of $250 provides training and poultry to a village-based literacy worker.