EFFECTING CHANGE: YEAR 1 RESULTS FROM OUR FLAGSHIP PROGRAM IN WEST AFRICA
We can’t believe a whole year has already passed since we started our ‘Education for Every Child Today (EFECT)’ project, implemented in partnership with Education Above All’s Educate A Child (EAC) program with support from the Qatar Fund for Development. This ambitious project aims to make a lasting impact across Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria by placing and retaining 96,000 elementary school-aged children in quality elementary education by 2026 – and we’ve been busy!
Making big strides
This project sits at the heart of Street Child’s core work with children marginalized by poverty, conflict, geography, gender and/or disability. A significant focus for the first year was to engage communities in conversations about the importance of education, so over the past 12 months we have engaged with more than 24,000 caregivers to promote the benefits of schooling and highlight their children’s right to education. As a result, to date we have enrolled more than 16,500 out-of-school children, 50% of whom are girls, in quality elementary education, with thousands more primed for enrolment at the start of the next school year.
Building for the future
Enrolling children in education is only possible if schools are within walking distance of students’ homes, which is not the case for many children in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria. EFECT is addressing this by building classrooms based on the needs of the specific communities. For example, in Sierra Leone and Liberia we are contructing three-classroom schools for long-term use, whereas in Nigeria we are using temporary learning centers to reach children affected by conflict. Temporary learning centers are light structures that can be built quickly to support rapid re-entry to learning after conflict, and are designed primarily for displaced communities to mitigate against disruption and dropout from education. This year we established 50 temporary learning centers for children affected by conflict in Nigeria and recruited 100 community teachers. We are also on track to have 75 new classrooms constructed for the start of the new academic year in Sierra Leone, and 15 classrooms are already complete in Liberia. We anticipate that access to education will be provided for 1,800 out-of-school children who did not attend school previously in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Going beyond the classroom for long-term change
While infrastructure is important, access to education goes beyond a physical building. In Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria children are often relied upon to support their family’s income through child labor instead of attending school. Reducing the financial barriers to education is often the difference between a child attending school and that child dropping out. In response to this, our flagship Family Business for Education (FBE) program offers families a package of bespoke training, mentoring, a cash grant to start or grow a viable business, and participation in a savings account to increase financial resilience. This enables caregivers to afford the long-term financial costs of their children’s education.
“We understand that caregivers become empowered through their ability to self-sustain their children's education in the long run.” - Emily Tunnacliffe, EFECT Senior Program Manager
So, what are our plans for Year 2?
We are already making progress towards our Year 2 goal of enrolling 30,160 out-of-school children into quality elementary education, encouraging as many caregivers as possible to support their children into school through community advocacy and awareness raising. For the next 12 months we will continue to enrol children in school, support caregivers to set up businesses, improve physical learning environments, train teachers, establish school income-generating activities and promote the benefits of education across communities. After the results of this year, we can’t wait to share more successes!