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.

Dr. Ben Alexandre Mpozembizi was born in East Africa, Rwanda in 1983 where he started his primary school at Cyumba PS in 1992. He continued secondary school from 1998 to 2004 at Petit Seminaire de Rwesero located in Gicumbi district, Northen Province. He succeeded the national exam and he was oriented to the National university of Rwanda from 2006 to 2010 where he studied Linguistics and Literature of English. After getting his Bachelor's degree, he started his carreer in teaching. He taught in CS Elena Guerra from 2011 to 2012 then after he gain the chance of being among of Regional school based mentors where he was deployed in Nyamagabe district. While being a School based mentor, he followed the post graduate programme in Education where in 2014 he got his Post graduate Diploma in Education (PGDE). In 2015, he started his Master program in Mahatma Gandhi University, Meghalaya-India and he winded up in 2017 with the MA in Public Administration. While following this program, he was working in World Vision International as a Literacy boost coordinator (Dec 2016- March 2020). After gaining his Master program, he started the Doctoral program (July 2017-Dec 2019) which he finished with the qualification of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Education (Applied linguistics) from Chhatrapati Shahu Ji Maharaj University, Kanpur-India. Henceforth, from February 2019 up to now, he has been a university lecturer in various universities such as INDANGABUREZI COLLEGE OF EDUCATION, KIBOGORA POLYTECHNIC, INSTITUT CATHOLIC DE KABGAYI, ... where he delivers numerous modules in the faculty of Education especially in the department of languages. Besides, he serves as an education consultant for community empowerment, learning and development, parental and community engagement,.... He is an author of various articles and books.The following are some of them: •Mpozembizi, B.A. (2019). The Impact of Local Self-governance on Socio-economic Development of Citizens. The case of Huye District/Rwanda. Houston: IJSER Publishing, Vol. 10, Issue 12. •Mpozembizi, B.A. (2019). The Post-independence Problems of Power and Leadership in the Emergent Nation as reflected in Achebe's A Man of the People. Global Scientific Journals, Vol. 7, Issue 12. •Mpozembizi, B.A. (2021). WILL PRIVATE SCHOOLS RISE FROM THE COVID-19 TOMB? ANALYSIS OF A RWANDAN CONTEXT OF PRIVATE SCHOOLS WITH THEIR ECONOMIES IN THEAFTERMATH OF COVID-19. Academia Letters, Article 555.