HIV and AIDS Case Study: Kande’s Story

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Community members share and learn through Kande's story together.

Community members share and learn through Kande's story together.

“I have been attending HIV and AIDS seminars but I had never come to understand well about it. However, I will live to remember this week, for from my own language I have learned more about this epidemic than what was taught to me for the last 20 years.”

 

Kande’s Story is a true-to-life short story based on a Nigerian pastor’s account of the ravages of AIDS in his community. In the story, Kande is a 12-year-old African girl whose father and mother die of AIDS. She and her five siblings are left as orphans and must fend for themselves.

Simply told and illustrated, readers of all ages are able to follow the storyline in their own language as Kande and her siblings encounter problems and dangers trying to survive. People in their community, especially believers from the local church, help them in their time of need.

Kande’s Story has essential health information concerning HIV and AIDS packaged in a five-chapter story. The story and illustrations are laid out in a master book (or ”shellbook”) ready to translate the content and adapt the book to the language and cultural setting in which it will be used.

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“This is my story. I thought I was the only one who had this problem, but I actually see now that there are others.”

 

 Often health workers assume that people will understand material disseminated in world languages like English or French or national languages like Swahili or Bahasa Indonesia. Translating Kande’s Story into local languages has proven more effective in engaging readers, allowing them to more fully understand the story.

The story also incorporates the role that African Churches can play in reaching out to those in need, linking it to foundational Biblical principles. Church leaders testify that now they have a tool to help address the stigma and break the silence surrounding HIV and AIDS in their congregations.

Providing people with an avenue to talk about and constructively respond to the disease according to their circumstances and in their language has been a significant step towards addressing AIDS at the most local level, where its impact is the most substantial.

  • One Kenyan Church group made plans to build a shelter and make a garden for a family of orphans after the first lesson of Kande’s Story.

  • Another class of 70 participants agreed to go to the local clinic and get tested for HIV together.

Kathie Watters, a Scripture use consultant for the Africa Region of SIL International, developed the Kande’s Story toolkit, which has now been translated and distributed in 24 countries and almost 200 languages.

For more information or a free download of the Kande’s Story toolkit, visit the Bloom Library. The information can be freely distributed; Watters and SIL ask only that the contents of the story be maintained, credit given appropriately, and electronic copies of new translations shared freely with others.

Additional links for Kande’s Story:

International Literacy Day 2012

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Paul Frank presenting the Kom Education Pilot Project on International Literacy Day in Washington, DC. 

Paul Frank presenting the Kom Education Pilot Project on International Literacy Day in Washington, DC. 

In celebration 0f International Literacy Day on September 7, USAID hosted over 650 people to celebrate the important role that literacy plays in development.  

In collaboration with the Global Partnership for Education, the Brookings Institution and Lions Club International, as well as World Vision and AusAID, the event was full of energy as new innovations were presented and 32 awards were given as a part of the Grand Challenge, a grant competition that will allow new projects in literacy and education reach millions of people in the developing world.

Paul Frank participated as part of a panel discussion on reading instruction and presented findings on the impact of a mother tongue-based multilingual education pilot program with the Kom, a language community in Northwest Cameroon. Representing SIL LEAD and SIL International, Paul explained multilingual education and the significance that projects like this one have in demonstrating the relevance of multilingual instruction.

The Kom Education Pilot Project is just one of many indicators of the success of a transitional multilingual education model. Findings from the Kom project demonstrated that after just one year of schooling using Kom, the mother tongue of the children in the classroom, students had higher overall test scores than the students in the schools that were using English as the language of instruction. In addition, students from the Kom education program consistently outperformed their peers in Reading, Math, and Oral English.

After several years, the students in the Kom-medium schools continued to outperform their peers in the control schools. The use of the mother tongue as a medium of instruction has brought significant improvements in learning outcomes, especially in grades 1-3. The children in the experimental schools show stronger reading comprehension, oral proficiency, and general lexical knowledge in English. This advantage persists for at least two years after Kom-medium instruction has ended. The children in the Kom-medium schools actually performed better in English than the children in the English-medium schools, and that advantage persists after at least two years following the end of the intervention.