Prosper’s innovative way of teaching using pictures
- ellenarnison
- Aug 10
- 2 min read
The difference that image-based training makes to a population who struggled to get the education they needed
Imagine that you’re invited to a training course that could help you start a business, grow your livelihood or improve your financial inclusion. But there’s a problem - the materials are pages of written notes and you never had the chance to go to school. How do you feel? Would you stay? Would you be confident contributing?
For many of the women Prosper serves in Sierra Leone, this isn’t hypothetical, it’s reality.
According to national data, only around 30% of adult women in Sierra Leone are literate, meaning over 2.5million can’t comfortably read or write. Traditional training approaches, built around written manuals and classroom-style delivery, simply don’t work for most of our participants.
Prosper targets the most vulnerable and disadvantaged people in a community, often those with little or no formal schooling, limited literacy and minimal exposure to classroom-style learning.
Why Images?
Written materials assume the ability to read. Traditional classroom lectures assume a comfort with listening to explanations and making your own notes. Neither assumption holds in a low-literacy settings. Images give us a shared starting point, something everyone - participants and facilitators - can look at together, interpret and discuss.
Images do three essential jobs that make images powerful learning tools across all literacy levels:
Build understanding of a concept. Participants read the image shapes, people, actions and context, then begin to connect them to something they already know. Meaning is co-created within the group
Trigger memory later. Once an image has been discussed and understood, seeing it again can instantly bring back the underlying idea, steps, or behaviour change we’re encouraging.
Create engaging training sessions. Image-based training where concepts are developed by participants are much more interesting and fun than ‘traditional’ classroom-style lectures.
In many cultures, knowledge is passed down through stories, parables, myths, and fables, not textbooks. People interpret the story, draw lessons, and apply them to their own lives.
Our images function in a similar way. They are not literal diagrams to be memorised. They are conversation starters and visual prompts that invite interpretation. By talking through what’s happening in the image, participants map the lesson to their lived reality.
When people generate meaning themselves, they remember it and they use it. Training that was designed for people struggling at the margins of society - sadly the majority of women in parts of Sierra Leone - is an effective learning system for everyone. It has been proven as a powerful way of ensuring that learning sticks, and that progress, achievement and impact follows.
