1 in 10 children are out of school.

1 in 4 children complete school unable to write or count.

Street Child works with a network of local partners to ensure every child has access to an education, especially in low resource environments and emergencies.

A huge number of children live in severe poverty, conflict or other crisis zones, where education is disrupted or impossible. Once children have dropped out of school - for any reason - the more time that passes, the less likely they are to ever return. So when an acute crisis occurs, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which at one point led to school closures affecting 90% of all school-age children, it is imperative that we keep education going, and help children to catch up on any missed learning so they can return to school in the right grade for their age.

From rural areas that have never had a school to classrooms that have been destroyed because of disaster or conflict, millions of children are unable to go to school across the world today simply because there are no schools for them to go to.

For children who are in school, many schools are not good enough quality, with hundreds of students per classroom, a lack of toilets, sanitary facilities, capable teachers, and/or adequate learning materials. 

Parental and community attitudes can often also hold back children's education, especially for girls from late elementary-school age and upwards, stopping them from going to school or making them earn a living for the family instead of getting an education. 

WHAT WE ARE DOING

Accelerated foundational learning in numeracy & literacy

This is used for children who have never been to school as well as those who have attended but have dropped out for any reason.

Based on the Teaching at the Right Level methodology (TaRL) our accelerated learning program (ALP) catalyzes catch-up learning and the attainment of foundational learning levels for children who have fallen behind because their education has been disrupted. Depending on context it can take between three to six months to achieve foundational levels, so it works for children who are on the move; and the schedule is flexible, so it can also be effective for children who have other responsibilities (such as child labor). If appropriate or possible it can support children back into the classroom at the right grade for their age, or into income generation and entrepreneurship if schooling is no longer an option / desirable for them.

The ALP is always adapted for context, dovetailing with government education priorities and curricula to strengthen the local education system itself, and can be delivered in-person or remotely depending on need. Flagship programs delivering the ALP include Marginalized No More in Nepal, where 11,300 women and girls of the Musahar caste rose from 4% literacy to 55%, and Liberia, where as part of the Liberian Government’s public/private education partnership (LEAP) we raised learning levels across 12 schools by 0.5SDs and were named Top Peformer in an RCT by the Center for Global Development.

school improvement

To ensure the long term success of education we support schools to establish profitable social enterprises, so that the school itself can generate income with which to pay teachers and maintain the quality of the school environment. This takes the pressure off the community and leads to higher school attendance. This model has been running the longest in Sierra Leone, where we have provided schools with agricultural grants and technical support to develop businesses such as rice farms and seed lending banks, where the profits made following harvest help to meet educational costs. In Sierra Leone in 2021 alone we set up 80 income generating initiatives in rural elementary schools.

Building schools in rural communities is a core element of our work. We began in 2010 building 'first-ever schools' for some of the most remote communities in the highly rural Tambakha Chiefdom in northern Sierra Leone, and since then we hve focused heavily on temporary or permanent learning spaces in humanitarian crisis zones including North-East Nigeria, post-earthquake Nepal, Ukraine, Afghanistan and Syria.

teacher training

To date we have supported around 100,000 teachers to complete government-recognized training courses, in-service training, continuous professional development programs, and / or shorter, specialized interventions on topics such as disaster risk resilience and education in emergencies.

changing attitudes

Parental and community attitudes can often also hold back children's education, especially once girls reach puberty and are considered marriagable and therefore a family commodity. Street Child programs work with communities to promote the rights of all children to education - and the importance of on-going parental and caregiver support to a child's academic progress. In particular we advocate to improve the status of girls by shaping the gender norms held by parents and community leaders, showing them that girls are both educable and have a right to literacy and numeracy. For example, in Uganda our ‘Change the Story’ program increased the literacy and numeracy of levels of more than 2,000 young mothers.