Mother-Tongue Based Instruction & Multilingualism for Agenda 2063

ACT 106 equips early childhood, primary, secondary, and STEM educators to teach in and through African languages rather than treating them as obstacles to be overcome. The course grounds participants in the psycholinguistics of mother-tongue cognition, the pedagogies of translanguaging and code-switching, and the practical craft of building subject-specific terminology in indigenous languages. It culminates in a deployable bilingual subject glossary and translanguaging lesson-plan pack that a teacher can use immediately in a real classroom. When African learners are forced to conceptualise fluid mechanics, algebra, or cellular biology in a colonial language they are still acquiring, cognitive load rises and conceptual development is stunted. Decades of research on mother-tongue-based multilingual education (MTB-MLE) show that foundational learning, numeracy, and later second-language acquisition all improve when instruction begins in the language the learner speaks most fluently. Yet across most African systems, policy commitments to MTB-MLE remain under-resourced, teacher preparation is thin, and technical and scientific registers in African languages are underdeveloped. This triple gap is the developmental bottleneck ACT 106 confronts. Structured as three stackable 5-credit badges, the course moves educators from the psycholinguistics of language and cognition, through translanguaging and code-switching as pedagogical assets, to the construction and peer-reviewed defence of a multilingual pedagogical toolkit.