To date, OLA has been used in: Ethiopia (Amharic), Guyana (in English), Liberia (in English), Mali (in Bambara and Songhai), Rwanda (in Kinyarwanda) and Sierra Leone (in English).

OLA has been used to support literacy initiatives in different ways, including to: guide curriculum and materials development, design educator trainings, inform policy, and provide other valuable data to beneficiaries and stakeholders from program implementation.  In the countries where OLA is being piloted, Ministry of Education officials have participated in the OLA development and implementation to build their capacity of government teams in youth and adult literacy assessments.

Praise for OLA

“It’s a strong tool for assessing literacy skills, in particular the task that addresses real-life reading skills. Participants could instantly relate to images and texts sourced from their daily lives, for example, Liberia’s $10 bill, a bag of rice, a building’s opening hours, etc. I think it provides a more informed picture of the learner’s ability and skills based on their lived experiences.”

-Pauline Tee-tee Browne, USAID Advancing Youth Project, Liberia

 “At the beginning of Skye Guyana Work Ready Now, we quickly realized that many of our youth beneficiaries were struggling with reading course materials. Many of our participants were not starting from scratch, but we needed to pinpoint where they were at. Through using OLA, we learned the intricacies of assessing literacy, especially of youth. The OLA subtask results gave us an appreciation of how they had used their problem-solving skills to navigate literacy in their environment.”

-Ann Hershkowitz, SKYE Program, Guyana