ABSTRACT
Out-of-school children in sub-Saharan Africa continue to be one of the greatest educational challenges of our time with deepening poverty and reliance on subsistence farming in extreme poverty zones across the region. In Ghana, new approaches to education involving flexible accelerated learning to complement formal education is showing results, including in attracting the rural poor to these systems. The chapter empirically explores the parental and child response to participation in both formal and complementary basic education systems in two northern districts in Ghana’s extreme poverty zone. It investigates the key factors which attract parents to the complementary education system, which they often prefer over formal education. The qualitative investigation, which took place in five rural communities in each of the two districts, found that there is growing demand for complementary basic education due to the flexibility in learning time that suits local agricultural demands, the use of local languages in instruction, the high commitment levels of facilitators, alternative disciplinary approaches and the participatory pedagogic approaches to reading, writing and numeracy. The findings suggest that the complementary education approach helps transition large numbers of out-of-school children into higher grades of primary school, after completing the nine-month programme.
