A case study of support for girls' access to primary school in Ghana.

The Strategic Approach to Girls' Education (STAGE) project developed and implemented an intervention that helped marginalized out-of-school girls in the northern regions of Ghana enter and be successful in primary school. STAGE builds on the Government of Ghana's Complementary Basic Education policy, which supports an accelerated learning program that provides literacy and numeracy classes in mother tongue to out-of-school girls between 8 and 14 years of age. This article reviews the literature that informed the design of STAGE, describes the intervention, reports on the impact on its participants, and suggests a model for replicating this intervention in Ghana and adapting it for implementation in other countries.

Leave no one behind: improving health and risk communication through attention to literacy.

Twice in recent times, the federal government mailed critical health-related information to every household in the United States. The mailings, the 1988 brochure Understanding AIDS and the 2001 postcard A Message to Americans, were designed to provide the general public with important information about needed action. This paper compares the development process undertaken for each mailing.