Examining the Impact of Homegrown School Feeding Program on Literacy Improvement in Rutsiro, District, Rwanda

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2021 in the subject Education - Reading Instruction, grade: Doctor of Philosophy, , course: Education, language: English, abstract: This thesis explored the impact of Home grown school feeding program which were designed and implemented by WFP with its different partners in Rwanda between 2015 and 2020, with the aim to understand their impact on literacy improvement. Primary education is receiving much attention from governments of all countries and NGOs in recent times. However, poverty and hunger serves as barriers to achieving the Education for All (EFA) policy in Rwanda. To actualize the EFA in Rwanda, there was the introduction of some educational intervention programmes such as the capitation grant and the school feeding. School feeding programmes are safety net programmes as well as educational interventions ensuring that children with poor parents are given at least a meal a day at school. In Home grown school feeding program intervention (Rutsiro, Karongi, Nyaruguru and Nyamagabe districts), students get porridge and food respectively. Therefore, this thesis adopted the qualitative research method to investigate how Home grown school feeding program contributes to literacy improvement in Rutsiro district, Rwanda. As a result, approximately one-third of our research sample is reading at or above the WCPM range. Besides this, there are differences in boys’ and girls’ performance at certain ranges of WCPM, with a quarter of the male sample reading no words at all compared to 11.8 percent of females. Girls also outperform boys at the 16-30 WCPM range, but this trend reverses at the highest WCPM range, with nearly a quarter of boys reading 41-56 WCPM but just 13.6 percent of girls. The findings show that students who could read aloud have much better comprehension ratings: 92.6 percent meet or exceed standard compared to 64.8 percent of those with lower oral fluency. The difference is even more marked when comparing the percentages in the exceeds category: 65.6 percent of students who read on their own answered 4-5 comprehension questions correctly compared to 35.9 percent of those who listened to the story.