Basa Pilipinas project helps 1.8 M children

CEBU CITY — Basa Pilipinas, a project funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-Philippines in partnership with the Department of Education (DepEd), has helped 1.8 million Filipino children in 3,000 USAID-supported public elementary schools in the country.

Last Tuesday, USAID and DepEd brought local education leaders from Cebu, Mandaue City, Bohol and Tagbilaran City to a handover event at the Cordova Central Elementary School to celebrate and report the accomplishments of Basa Pilipinas.

USAID-Philippines Chief of the Office of Education Brian Levey said the students come from kindergarten through Grade 3.

The project has trained 19,000 teachers and school heads, Levey said, and provided more than nine million teacher guides, storybooks and other education aids to 3,000 public elementary schools.

“USAID believes that education is crucial for development and that the foundation of education begins with reading,” Levey said.

He commended the teachers, school heads and divisions who had been working with them for over five years in implementing new approaches in teaching, reading and literacy to students from kindergarten to elementary.

USAID launched Basa Pilipinas in 2013 with the goal of improving the reading and comprehension skills of Filipino students. It is a five-year project implemented in eight schools divisions in Regions 1 and 7.

DepEd Central Visayas director Dr. Juliet Jeruta stressed the impact of Basa Pilipinas to young Filipino learners. She said the project prepared the elementary students for their secondary education.

“There are students in Grade Seven to 10 that still cannot read and comprehend. That’s rather an insult to all of us!” said Jeruta, addressing teachers who let students pass and be promoted to the next grade with poor reading skills. “Early graders should be readers and independent learners,” Jeruta said.

The 2015 evaluation of Basa Pilipinas showed that USAID’s intervention through the project helped increase the fluency of students by an additional nine words per minute and reading comprehension by 23 percent, Jeruta said.

Jeruta, however, added that a child should be engaged in reading and comprehension practices first at home by singing lullabies and reading bed time stories to them. (With reports from Larnie L. Bacalando/PIT Intern)