The maiden edition of the KIM's Learning Sessions, an initiative to promote learning amongst children in rural and deprived communities, has been held at Kpongu in the Wa Municipality over the weekend.
The concept, which is by the 10-year-old boy of the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Mara Foods, is aimed at promoting learning and improving learning outcomes among children in rural and deprived communities.
Held with children of the St Benedict Roman Catholic Primary School at Kpongu, over 50 pupils drawn from Basic 1 and 2 grades participated in the learning activities amidst play, singing, clapping and dancing.
The learning activities included reading, writing and penmanship activities where children were provided work materials and guided to perform some writing activities repeatedly to consolidate their grasp of the concepts.
The children were also taken through interactive reading sessions and aided to make meaning out of the text read and the moral lessons thus learnt.
The learning activities were mostly through peer learning where the children shared the learning experiences with their fellow children with overall guidance and supervision from an elderly and experienced team of mentors and volunteers.
Best performed children were awarded books, pencils, pencil sharpeners, erasers, colours and crayons among others. All participants were given reading books and pencils.
The children were admonished to practice what they had been taught and to generally take their learning seriously as the KIM's Learning Sessions team would from time to time visit them to see how they are progressing.
They could not hide their joy for the wonderful learning session they experienced and hoped the next visit comes soon.
The maiden outreach followed the launch of the initiative at Biihee in the Wa Municipality on December 30, 2022, which marked the 10th birthday anniversary of the boy.
Kieran Iqbal Mwinekumo, the 10-year-old brain behind the KIM's Learning Sessions initiative, conceived the idea when he followed his enterprising mother to rural communities where she trained women on vocational and business development skills, during which he saw that children who came with their mothers loitered aimlessly if not distract their mothers' concentration on training activities.
Then he thought, "why don't we develop a concept to engage the children in learning activities while their mothers are engaged in training activities?" hence the birth of KIM's Learning Sessions.
It is the boy's wish that the learning sessions would be held at least twice every month in rural and deprived communities to support his fellow children to learn.
He appealed to the general public, individuals, institutions and organizations with similar interests to support the initiative in any manner ideal to improve the learning outcomes of children in these disadvantaged communities.
The initiative is in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 of ensuring equal access to education by all children by 2030.