Education

Strengthening Female Youth Resilience in Somalia Learnings from AGES and SOMGEP-T

A quality, relevant education is core to adaptive capacities for resilience, equipping children and youth with the skills to cope with shocks and adapt to new livelihoods.1 Schools and non-formal learning environments may also contribute to develop transformative capacities for resilience: strengthening social cohesion through peer support networks; equipping students for collective action and participation in decision-making; and shifting gender norms. Education also has the potential to build absorptive capacities for resilience through engaging adolescents and youth in informal savings groups, strengthening preparedness for shocks, and providing safeguarding mechanisms. Developing resilience capacities is relevant for all, but particularly for adolescent girls coming of age in crisis-affected contexts and those living in displacement. Read More...

Learning outcomes, transition, & retention Stories of change from AGES project in Somalia

The Adolescent Girls’ Education in Somalia (AGES) project aims to improve learning outcomes and positive transitions
for 82,975 extremely vulnerable girls and female youth in South Somalia. In 2019-2022, AGES enrolled a total of 62,288
girls in formal primary education (including regular and special needs schools), accelerated basic education (ABE), and non-formal education classes (NFE). Each learning pathway is adapted to girls’ age range and needs, including flexible delivery and content. The project works with Ministries of Education (MOEs) to coach teachers on delivering subject content, adopting inclusive and gender-responsive practices, and providing remedial education where applicable. AGES also trains teachers and Community Education Committees (CECs) to routinely follow up on cases of absenteeism and dropout. Through AGES, girls who are frequently absent or facing temporary school closures due to attacks and natural disasters are provided with remote learning materials and remedial support. As of November 2022, 49% of the students reported receiving remedial support from teachers. Read More...

Strategic Evaluation Report Education for Ethnic Minorities Program: Cambodia

Since 2002, CARE1 has worked in partnership with the Royal Government of Cambodia through the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (MoEYS) and other stakeholders such as the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) to develop and implement a multi-lingual education (MLE) model within the Education for Ethnic Minorities (EEM) program. The total amount of funding contributed to this Program since 2002 is AUD17.5million by 24 donors, not including donations from the Australian public.
The MLE model aims to increase ethnolinguistic minority children’s access to, and the quality of, primary and secondary education. Ethnolinguistic minorities (hereafter referred to as ethnic minorities) are groups of people who share a culture and/or ethnicity and/or language that distinguishes them from other groups of people and are either fewer in terms of number or less prestigious in terms of power than the dominant groups in the state. In Cambodia, ethnic minority groups are generally located in the five highland provinces of north-eastern Cambodia – Kratie, Mondul Kiri, Preah Vihear, Ratanak Kiri, and Stung Treng. There are 20 ethnic minority spoken languages across these five provinces. Brao, Bunong, Kavet, Kreung and Tampeun2 are used as the L1 of the MLE program in the relevant provinces, with Jarai and Kuy in the process of being adopted (Ball and Smith, 2018).
CARE’s mother tongue MLE model using ethnic minority languages and Khmer was piloted in Ratanak Kiri beginning in 2003 after a year’s preparations and has been expanded to four additional north-eastern provinces (Mondul Kiri, Stung Treng, Kratie, and Preah Vihear) under the government’s Multilingual Education National Action Plan (MENAP 2015-2018). In recent years, CARE shifted from its original role as direct implementer to that of a technical advisor to the Royal Government of Cambodia. The program is unprecedented internationally as having gone from a successful community-based initiative run by community school management committees and using community-selected teachers, to being institutionalized as part of government policy for improving access to and quality of education for ethnic minority learners. Read More...

POST-PROJECT LEAD IMPACT ASSESSMENT “INTEGRATING SOCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY INTO DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION

The project "Integrating Social Accountability in Education for Development" (LEAD) is a social accountability project understood as the continuous process of improving collaborative relationships, compliance with commitments made, and accountability between institutional actors and citizens in
order to contribute to participatory governance in the education system. The LEAD project ran from October 1, 2014 to September 30, 2018. It was funded by the World Bank's Global Partnership for Social Accountability (GPSA). It aimed to improve the performance of the education system not only within schools but also at the provincial (DPMEN1) and regional (AREF2) levels. During this period, the project was piloted in 50 schools between the region of Marrakech- Safi (Province of Al Haouz) and Casablanca- Settat (Prefecture of Sidi Bernoussi). Read More...

Learning From Failure 2022

In 2019 and 2020, CARE published Learning from Failures reports to better understand common problems that projects faced during implementation. Deliberately looking for themes in failure has helped CARE as an organization and provides insight on what is improving and what still needs troubleshooting. This report builds on the previous work to show what we most need to address in our programming now.
As always, it is important to note that while each evaluation in this analysis cited specific failures and areas for improvement in the project it reviewed, that does not mean that the projects themselves were failures. Of the 72 evaluations in this analysis, only 2 showed projects that failed to deliver on more than 15% of the project goals. The rest were able to succeed for at least 85% of their commitments. Rather, failures are issues that are within CARE’s control to improve that will improve impact for the people we serve.
To fully improve impact, we must continue to include failures in the conversation. We face a complex future full of barriers and uncertainties. Allowing an open space to discuss challenges or issues across the organization strengthens CARE’s efforts to fight for change. Qualitative analysis provides critical insights that quantitative data does not provide insight into the stories behind these challenges to better understand how we can develop solutions.
CARE reviewed a total of 72 evaluations from 65 projects, with 44 final reports published between February 2020 and September 2021 and 28 midterm reports published between March 2018 and October 2020. Seven projects had both midterm and final evaluations at the time of this analysis. For ease of analysis, as in previous years, failures were grouped into 11 categories (see Annex A, the Failures Codebook for details).

Results
The most common failures in this year’s report are:
• Understanding context—both in the design phase of a project and refining the understanding of context and changing circumstances throughout the whole life of a project, rather than a concentrated analysis phase that is separate from project implementation. For example, an agriculture project that built it’s activities assuming that all farmers would have regular internet access, only to find that fewer than 10% of project participants had smartphones and that the network in the area is unreliable, has to significantly redesign both activities and budgets.
• Sustainability—projects often faced challenges with sustainability, particularly in planning exit strategies. Importantly, one of the core issues with sustainability is involving the right partners at the right time. 47% of projects that struggled with sustainability also had failures in partnership. For example, a project that assumed governments would take over training for project participants once the project closed, but that failed to include handover activities with the government at the local level, found that activities and impacts are not set up to be sustainable.
• Partnerships—strengthening partnerships at all levels, from government stakeholders to community members and building appropriate feedback and consultation mechanisms, is the third most common weakness across projects. For example, a project that did not include local private sector actors in its gender equality trainings and assumes that the private sector would automatically serve women farmers, found that women were not getting services or impact at the right level.
Another core finding is that failures at the design phase can be very hard to correct. While projects improve significantly between midterm and endline, this is not always possible. There are particular kinds of failure that are difficult to overcome over time. Major budget shortfalls, a MEAL plan that does not provide quality baseline data, and insufficient investments in understanding context over the entire life of a project are less likely to improve over time than partnerships and overall MEAL processes.
Some areas also showed marked improvements after significant investments. Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (MEAL), Gender, Human Resources, and Budget Management are all categories that show improvements over the three rounds of learning from failures analysis. This reflects CARE’s core investments in those areas over the last 4 years, partly based on the findings and recommendations from previous Learning From Failure reports. Specifically, this round of data demonstrates that the organization is addressing gender-related issues. Not only are there fewer failures related to gender overall, the difference between midterm and final evaluations in gender displays how effective these methods are in decreasing the incidence of “failures” related to engaging women and girls and looking at structural factors that limit participation in activities.
Another key finding from this year’s analysis is that projects are improving over time. For the first time, this analysis reviewed mid-term reports in an effort to understand failures early enough in the process to adjust projects. Projects report much higher rates of failure at midterm than they do at final evaluation. In the projects where we compared midline to endline results within the same project, a significant number of failures that appeared in the mid-term evaluation were resolved by the end of the project. On average, mid-term evaluations reflect failures in 50% of possible categories, and final evaluations show failures in 38% of possible options. Partnerships (especially around engaging communities themselves), key inputs, scale planning and MEAL are all areas that show marked improvement over the life of the project.
Read More...

Expanding Access to Education and Life Opportunities (Excel)

Expanding Access to Education and Life Opportunities (EXCEL) is an education initiative implemented in Pratappur, Sarawal and Palhinandan Rural Municipalities of Nawalparasi (west) district of Lumbini province. The project aimed to provide access to basic education for marginalized adolescent girls for better life opportunities through a year-long accelerated learning program known as “UDAAN”. Read More...

Somali Girls Education Promotion Project Transition (SOMGEP-T) Baseline

CARE International launched SOMGEP and, following its successful completion, continued its programming through Somali Girls’ Education Promotion Project – Transition (SOMGEP-T). The project, which began on May 1 2017 and is expected to close on October 31 2021, builds on evidence from SOMGEP and seeks to further address barriers and challenges Somali girls face related to attendance and learning outcomes. At proposal stage, the project was expected to reach a total of 27,146 marginalised girls; calculations based on up to date enrolment data indicate that the project is estimated to reach 27,722 in-school girls across 148 primary schools and 53 secondary schools in Somaliland, Puntland, and Galmudug, as well as 5,140 out-of-school girls in the same locations.
SOMGEP-T aims to bring about sustainable improvements to the learning and transition outcomes of marginalised Somali girls. To address barriers and the causes of marginalisation, the SOMGEP-T Theory of Change (ToC) focuses on four key outputs: (1) Improved access to post-primary options, (2) Supportive school practices and conditions for marginalised girls, (3) Positive shifts on gender and social norms at community and individual girl level, and (4) Enhanced MoEs’ capacity to deliver quality and relevant formal and informal education. Outputs are expected to contribute to the achievement of the project’s four intermediate outcomes of attendance, retention, improved quality of teaching, and life skills development, which will in turn contribute to the long-term goals of improving learning outcomes, boosting transition rates, and ensuring the sustainability of changes brought about by the project.
The SOMGEP-T evaluation uses a mixed-methods, quasi-experimental design, involving a longitudinal panel of girls with a non-randomly assigned comparison group. The baseline sample comprises 76 schools, with 38 intervention schools and 38 comparison schools. The primary findings from the evaluation are summarised below. Read More...

Somali Girls Education Promotion Project – Transition (SOMGEP-T) Midline Round 2

The long-term goal of SOMGEP-T is to bring about sustainable improvements to the learning and transition outcomes of marginalised Somali girls. Marginalised girls who are targeted under SOMGEP-T are expected to exhibit meaningful improvements in learning outcomes (literacy, numeracy, and financial literacy) and transition outcomes (transition rate) as compared to a comparison group; targeted schools, communities and government institutions are expected to demonstrate indications of sustainability. The project targets the underlying causes of marginalization, specifically through influencing stakeholder attitudes and promoting social change at the household, school, community and policy/governance levels.

Three general observations emerge from the aggregate learning analysis. The first is the program’s apparent impact on financial literacy. When using the pure longitudinal panel of all the individuals who overlap between Baseline and Midline Round 2, the impact is a substantive 8.4 percentage in favour of intervention schools. Secondly, increases in numeracy outcomes are systematically higher among intervention girls. The panel consisting of girls who have been enrolled since baseline has improved their results on average by 4.6 points more than the comparison group since the baseline. This divergence has almost entirely occurred between the two midline evaluation rounds, likely because impacts of the program in this regard are not immediate. Thirdly, despite indications of program impact in financial literacy and numeracy, literacy outcomes in comparison schools have often shown more marked improvement than intervention schools since the baseline. Read More...

Somali Girls Education Promotion Program Transition (SOMGEP-T) Midline

Despite ongoing efforts, learning outcomes in Somalia remain among the lowest in the region, particularly for girls. Boys and girls contend with different gender and social norms that tend to undermine their ability to stay in school, study and advance from grade to grade. Girls in Somalia are living in an environment undergoing deep transitions in social and gender norms, where traditional norms expecting women to primarily care for children in the home and assume responsibility for household tasks, and placing little value or emphasis on education for women coexist with new roles for women as entrepreneurs, heads of household and main breadwinners at home, thus increasing demand on girls’ education. Since the time of the baseline, rural-rural migration has increased, predominantly as a result of economic hardship that has persisted among households that have been most heavily affected by drought. At the level of national government, MoE personnel tend to change frequently, leading to lack of continuity over time, but there is also increased funding for educational initiatives. It is in this context that CARE International launched SOMGEP and, following its successful completion, continued its programming through Somali Girls’ Education Promotion Project – Transition (SOMGEP-T). The project, which began on May 1 2017 and is expected to close on October 31 2021, builds on evidence from SOMGEP and seeks to further address barriers and challenges Somali girls face related to attendance and learning outcomes. At proposal stage, the project was expected to reach a total of 27,146 marginalised girls; calculations based on up to date enrolment data indicate that the project is estimated to reach 27,722 in-school girls across 148 primary schools and 53 secondary schools in 22 target districts in Somaliland, Puntland, and Galmudug, as well as 5,140 out-of-school girls in the same locations.
SOMGEP-T aims to bring about sustainable improvements to the learning and transition outcomes of marginalised Somali girls. To address barriers and the causes of marginalisation, the SOMGEP-T Theory of Change (ToC) focuses on four key outputs: (1) Improved access to post-primary options, (2) Supportive school practices and conditions for marginalised girls, (3) Positive shifts on gender and social norms at community and individual girl level, and (4) Enhanced MoEs’ capacity to deliver quality and relevant formal and informal education. Outputs are expected to contribute to the achievement of the project’s four intermediate outcomes of attendance, retention, improved quality of teaching, and life skills development, which will in turn contribute to the long-term goals of improving learning outcomes, boosting transition rates, and ensuring the sustainability of changes brought about by the project.
The SOMGEP-T evaluation uses a mixed-methods, quasi-experimental design, involving a longitudinal panel of girls with a non-randomly assigned comparison group. The present study describes the results after four months of exposure to the intervention for in-school girls and presents the baseline findings for girls attending an alternative learning program (ALP). The midline sample comprises 63 schools, with 32 intervention schools and 31 comparison schools, plus 32 ALP sites (17 shared with the midline sample, 15 unique to the ALP sample). The primary findings from the evaluation are summarised below. Read More...

Somali Girls Education Promotion Project Transition (SOMGEP-T) Endline Evaluation

The Somali Girls’ Education Promotion Project – Transition (SOMGEP-T), funded by UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO) and USAID, was implemented from 2017-2022 in rural and remote areas of Somaliland, Puntland, and Galmudug, reaching an estimated 20,000 girls and 10,000 boys directly and another 20,000 students through indirect benefits. The implementation of SOMGEP-T followed on the successes of SOMGEP (2013-17, funded by FCDO), with a particular focus on enhancing learning outcomes and transition rates for marginalised adolescent girls. SOMGEP-T was implemented by a consortium formed by CARE International, ADRA, local women’s rights network NAGAAD, and local non-governmental organisations HAVOYOCO (a youth-led committee) and TASS. The project’s activities were conducted in close collaboration with state- and national-level Ministries of Education, responding to priority areas identified in state and Federal-level sector development plans.
SOMGEP-T used a mixed-methods, quasi-experimental design for impact measurement. The endline evaluation sample included 69 primary schools, split between 37 intervention and 32 comparison schools. Additionally, a pre-post evaluation design was used to assess progress on accelerated education programming. Data collection took place in an additional 32 Alternative Learning Programme (ALP) centres and 35 Accelerated Basic Education (ABE) centres, which are located in the same communities as SOMGEP-T intervention schools. In total, the endline sample included 1,802 girls and their households, 965 of whom were re-contacted from the baseline and interviewed successfully. The endline data collection took place in December 2021.
Learning
A few key findings emerged from the learning analysis. Firstly, although improvements were observed in numeracy, Somali literacy, English literacy, and financial literacy amongst girls in intervention schools, these improvements were also simultaneously observed in girls in comparison schools. Secondly, learning improvements occurred largely within the first two years of the programme, prior to the ML2 evaluation – a finding which can largely be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting long-running school closures that occurred between the ML2 and endline evaluations.
At the endline, it became evident that SOMGEP-T had a much larger impact on learning among a few specific groups of ultra-marginalised girls, especially those marginalised along multiple overlapping axes, such as girls from relatively poor or pastoralist households who were out-of-school at the baseline, girls with physical disabilities, and the lowest-performing students at the baseline. For instance, girls from pastoralist households who were out-of-school at baseline gained an average of 10.8 percentage points in Somali literacy, over and above the comparison group. A similar, but less stark, pattern was observed in average numeracy scores (3.9 percentage points over and above the comparison group). In both cases gains among this subgroup were larger than among other out-of-school girls or pastoralist girls who were already in school when the programme started. Read More...

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