effective strategies in girls' education - Varkey Foundation

EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES IN GIRLS’ EDUCATION Lessons Learnt from Ghana

AUTHORS:

Emma Broadbent Celestine Dordoye Leonora Dowley Muniratu Issifu

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EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES IN GIRLS’ EDUCATION

About the Varkey Foundation The Varkey Foundation is a registered charity established to improve the standards of education for underprivileged children throughout the world. Our mission is that every child should have a good teacher. We do this through building teacher capacity, advocacy campaigns to promote excellence in teaching practice at the highest levels of policy making and providing grants to organisations that offer innovative solutions in support of our mission.

Trustees: David Clifford, Karen Giles, Amanda Jenkins, Sir Michael Lockett, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, Dino Varkey, Jay Varkey and Sunny Varkey. The Varkey Foundation is registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales under charity number 1145119 and a company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales under company number 07774287. Registered office: 5 New Street Square London EC4A 3TW

Contact: Vikas Pota Chief Executive 2nd Floor, St Albans House 57 – 59 Haymarket London, SW1Y 4QX. UK +44 (0) 20 7593 4040 [email protected]

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This policy briefing outlines our demonstrable commitment to Girls’ Education, sets out our key lessons learnt to emerge from the field, and offers DFID and other donor agencies relevant guidance in supporting effective Girls’ Education programming.

1. Why quality Girls’ Education? The Varkey Foundation Approach The post-2015 education agenda seeks to fill critical gaps in the quality and reach of education amongst the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, where girls find themselves facing multiple exclusions (World Bank, 2012). Following the major gains in widening access to primary education and reducing gaps between boys and girls achieved in line with Millennium Development Goal 2, we now need to be smarter about how to provide quality education that reaches the most marginalised. Here, the Varkey Foundation explains how its core mission to empower teachers to provide high-quality teaching is critical to achieving quality Girls’ Education at scale. Girls’ Education is a priceless asset and essential for development transformation The barriers to Girls’ Education exist at multiple (and reinforcing) levels: individual, familial and societal. Despite gains over the last fifteen years, major challenges remain. In Sub-Saharan Africa girls are still less likely to enrol in primary school than boys, despite gender parity in primary and secondary education being having improved globally. The issue is particularly stark for girls from the poorest families: among these, almost half of the girls (15 million) will never enter a

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classroom, girls, compared with just over a third of the boys (EFA, 2015). This means that they will not reach the transition to secondary school, nor higher education. Due to overlapping barriers tied to geography, gender, and poverty education for these girls is terminated at an early age. The issue here is not only one of gender parity: these numbers are hugely significant when we consider that an educated mother is more than twice as likely to send her children to school than a mother who did not complete primary school (UNICEF, 2009). The inter-generational effects of girls not attending school are therefore vast, as are the repercussions for wider society. Child deaths would be cut in half if all women had a secondary education, saving 3 million lives. And all maternal deaths would be reduced by two-thirds if each mother completed primary education (EFA, 2012). Poverty remains the most important factor linked to educational inequality alongside where a girl lives, her ethnicity, the language she speaks at home and whether she has a disability. There are multiple barriers to educating girls, including: unfavourable school environments,

discriminatory social and cultural factors, early marriage and school-related violence. In Ghana, where the Varkey Foundation’s Making Ghanaian Girls Great! (MGCubed) DFID-funded project supports 6000 girls to access high quality teaching and life-skills instruction both during and after school, we have encountered the effects of these constraints first hand. Girls in Ghana face multiple, reinforcing challenges that result in inequitable educational access, opportunity, and outcome (Atta, 2015; Lambert et al, 2012). While we must be clear that boys also face considerable barriers in accessing quality education, particularly in rural areas, the challenges girls face are greater still: household poverty and unequal power relations mean girls are pressured into early marriage, vulnerable to pregnancy, and expected to undertake a considerable proportion of household chores. Their education is often valued less than that of boys. Global evidence across a number of disciplines tells us that this is the case. Research has shown that “educating girls may be the investment for developing countries with the highest return” (Sperling and Winthrop, 2016). Education builds the human capital that is needed for economic growth, the reduction of poverty, and financial parity with men. The ‘education dividend’ is gradually being realised: a girl with an extra year of education can earn 20 percent more as an adult (World Bank, 2011), while each additional year of education is associated with 35% higher GDP per capita (Patrinos and Psacharopoulos, 2013). In India, a 1 percent increase in girls enrolling in school would lead to a GDP rise of $5.5 billion. At a micro level, by attaining a secondary education, a Pakistani woman can earn 70 percent what men earn, as opposed to only 51 percent with a primary education (EFA, 2012). Girls’ education is also correlated with significant improvements in health, nutrition, and life expectancy, and countries with an educated citizenry are more likely to be democratic and politically stable. The benefits are incalculable. A literate mother has a 50 percent higher chance that her child will survive past the age

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of 5 (UNESCO, 2011), while there is also evidence that education can prevent early pregnancy. 10 percent fewer girls under the age of 17 would become pregnant in sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia if they had a primary education (EFA, 2013). Girls’ Education is at the core of the Varkey Foundation mission The Varkey Foundation transforms the capacity of teachers and catalyses major shifts in learning approaches, using student-centred teaching practice. In 3 years we have trained nearly 25,000 teachers. The pace and the impact of our interventions have been overwhelming. Girls’ Education is not separate from our wider mission: supporting every child to benefit from a quality teacher, especially amongst marginalised groups where education is most transformative. We see our mission as integral to any Girls’ Education intervention. We come back to our founding belief that quality education needs quality teachers. Our concerns go beyond providing girls an education, but supporting an equitable school environment which transforms the way boys and girls interact now and in the future. This is an economic and political issue as much as it is a social issue. Girls’ education cannot be siloed; it is multi-sectoral and requires a multitude of skillsets to get right. We offer comprehensive support across DFID’s Girls’ Education priorities The Varkey Foundation’s commitment to Girls’ Education adopts a holistic whole-school approach, focusing on supporting equal opportunity and equitable education to those that need it most in places that need it most. We support DFID’s priorities for Girls’ Education in 3 principle ways:

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We focus on teachers as game changers

The Varkey Foundation philosophy is that it is

only by improving the quality of educators that we improve education. By directly targeting teachers themselves, we deal in people: the people that get up every morning to teach in schools around the world. We have provided support to nearly 25,000 teachers in Ghana and Uganda through our inservice Instructional Leader (IL) training programme, and in doing so have drastically altered the way over 1 million children in Sub-Saharan Africa learn – for the better. Our concern for teachers also means addressing some quite fundamental barriers to teachers being recognised and supported, engaging with political leaders and decision makers at all levels to ensure our work can be carried out. We are not afraid of tackling issues of power in our quest for equitable education and protective school environments for girls. 2.

We focus on marginalised and hard to reach girls

The teachers we train in Ghana and Uganda operate in largely rural areas where access to training is limited and teacher morale is often low. Here, educators occupy a particularly important space: they hold the key to social transformation led by the next generation of their former pupils. Our MGCubed project works with over 6000 girls (and nearly 6000 boys) identified as “marginalised”, providing in-school and after-school support to girls at risk of dropping out of school, early marriage, early pregnancy, and low educational attainment. The project also serves to encourage Out of School Girls within communities to return to school through positive role-modelling, peer support, and the provision of a safe school environment for girls. By adopting a student-centred approach to learning which encompasses a supportive, protective learning environment we work closely with school authorities to strengthen school management and systems, including embedding genderresponsiveness throughout the whole school and changing traditional disciplinary methods which involve physical punishment. 3.

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We support a holistic education which addresses a girls’ life cycle


Scaling quality studentcentred teaching through technology: MGCubed Working in 72 schools across 7 Districts in the Greater Accra and Volta regions, MGCubed equips 2 classrooms in each school with a technology package: a computer, projector, satellite modem and solar panels to provide reliable power 6 hours per day, 5 days per week. A studio in Accra uses the interactive distance learning platform to deliver both formal in-school teaching, and informal after-school sessions. For up to 2 hours of each school day, MGCubed delivers synchronous interactive English Language and Maths lessons to classes of 40 girls and boys, one class streamed at a basic ability level and the other, intermediate. For 2 hours per day after school, Wonder Women activities involve a single class of 60 girls, including around 10 out-ofschool girls. They follow a programme of group activities and discussions covering important practical topics (girls’ rights, sexual harassment, menstruation, malaria prevention, health, family planning, jobs, professions and careers), equipping these Wonder Women with new perspectives about their own environment and behaviours, and the choices available to them. These sessions also introduce the girls to inspirational Role Models: Ghanaian women from similar backgrounds who have successful careers in a variety of sectors.

For the Varkey Foundation, education goes hand-in-hand with the idea of global citizenship, fostering responsible and peace-supporting individuals who are able to fulfil themselves and impact their local communities. Our teacher training curriculum is designed to give teachers the tools to enable students to learn and grow through engaging them through a variety of learning methods that encourage positive learning environments, student-centred, activitybased group working, and equitable behaviours and attitudes. We support the development of self-esteem and lifeskills in our Wonder Women after-school clubs in Ghana. A key benefit of the clubs is the interactive discussions with adult female role models and the career exploration activities designed to combat marginalisation and boost aspirations and self-confidence. The MGCubed project demonstrates returns to Girls’ Education after two years Early results show that MGCubed has been a critical game changer in education for girls in the areas where we operate, generating significant buy in and interest from the Ministry of Education for future scaled interventions. 1.

Improved girls’ learning:

We are generating conclusive evidence that student-centred approaches work. In line with our own Varkey Foundation teacher performance standards we have seen that between the number of MGCubed facilitators meeting this standard outside of the MGCubed environment increased from 69 percent to 83 percent in less than a year. In terms of academic results, in 2015, an external randomised control trial (RCT) conducted by service provider Innovations for Poverty

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This is supported by our own 2014-2015 internal assessment data: during the academic year 2014/2015 MGCubed girls saw an average increase of almost 25 percent in their test scores for Mathematics. Progress has also been seen in English. The results of IPA’s midline evaluation in 2015 indicated positive effects on the words per minute reading measure for the lowest performing students, and on reading comprehension for students overall. Our internal assessment data shows a general increase in average English termly test scores during the 2015-2015 academic year. We are carrying out further research to understand the reasons behind these differences in progress, and have employed the full set of Early Grade Reading Assessment measures for the project’s endline.

Increased girls’ attendance in class:

Average attendance for girls at MGCubed classes increased from 54 percent to nearly 80 percent for girls between 2014 and 2015, indicating an increasing level of engagement and interest with their education. This is supported by 2016 qualitative data, which showed us that 100 percent of girls surveyed thought positively of the way the studio teachers taught Maths and English. 2.

Action (IPA) found that during its first year the project had very large, positive impacts on girls’ numeracy when compared with the control group. The most significant impacts were on girls in the lowest grade, though there are substantial effects on the upper grades as well.


Average attendance for girls at MGCubed classes increased from 54% to nearly 80% for girls between 2014 and 2015, indicating an increasing level of engagement and interest with their education.

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Improved girls’ self-esteem

Encouraging effects on girls’ self-esteem are also being seen, particularly in regard to the afterschool clubs, which confirms existing evidence on the efficacy of this strategy in helping girls to close the gaps in gender inequality in education (Unterhalter et al, 2014). In an analysis of over 130 girls’ feedback on the Wonder Women after-school sessions since 2014, over half the respondents proactively identified that the daily sessions had had a major effect on their confidence and self-respect, desire to avoid early marriage and pregnancy, and personal hygiene. This was echoed by Head Teachers, again over half of whom noticed considerable changes in student’s aspirations and confidence. Over 10 percent proactively referred to sharing the learning they had taken from Wonder Women with younger female family members. This is an issue we have now included in our termly monitoring system because we recognise we are potentially influencing many more girls than initially thought. Further, the external RCT found that girls who attended the Wonder Women sessions were significantly more likely to disagree with the statement “I think that I am a failure”. They were also more likely to disagree with the statement “I do not have much to be proud of” and were more likely to answer yes to the question, “If a mother wants to buy school items for her children, but their father does not agree, should she go ahead and buy them?” MGCubed girls were also more likely to want to attend university or gain higher education. These results are still early: they reflect the first two years of the MGCubed project’s implementation, with three terms yet to take place. The external evaluation results will be ready for publication in early 2017.

1. Results available in early 2017. 2. Internal data, conducted by Impact Manager. 3. Unpublished external evaluation data, IPA (May 2016). This also refers to boys.

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MGCubed is having a positive effect on girls’ learning outcomes: during the 2014/2015 academic year MGCubed girls saw an average increase of almost 25% in test scores for Mathematics.

2. Moving Forward: Lessons and Recommendations from the field

Implementing Girls’ Education interventions: Lessons learnt so far The Varkey Foundation’s core mission is to impact education by raising the status of teachers and their quality of teaching. We hold that issues of access, quality, and outcome in Girls’ Education will be transformed by prioritising teachers themselves. Our reflections on the MGCubed project help illustrate the relevance and appropriateness of the approach, as our lessons below outline. Sensitivity and respect for context is a basic principle for the Varkey Foundation: we do not believe that we will create sustainable change without buy-in from key actors, and for this we need to be tuned-in to the needs of our partners, whether these are headteachers, pupils or parents. These lessons have emerged on the basis of this principle and reflect our commitment to continuous learning and adaptation within project contexts. 4

Girls’ Education inputs are only effective if they include schoolteachers

Our girls’ education project in Ghana is primarily focused on girls’ attendance and education outcomes, but we note that an important side effect of the teaching we provide from our specially trained studio teachers is the impact on teaching practice within the schools we work with, as demonstrated by the high number of class observations indicating that the vast majority of the 140 trained MGCubed facilitators are using MGCubed teaching techniques outside of the studio-led lessons they facilitate. This is firmly in line with our core mission: to empower teachers. Support from teachers for the new teaching methodologies and classroom behaviours is essential if we hope to impact learning outcomes over the long term. This behaviour change is one of the components of the project that is most likely to be sustained, and is also something

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that is likely to have an impact on generations of future students that these teachers are responsible for. 4

A holistic approach to Girls’ Education is going to have the most traction

Our experience in the field and analysis of data collected over the course of the MGCubed project has taught us that we need to be thinking beyond narrowly-defined educational outcomes when we talk about Girls’ Education. A holistic approach, which takes into account the entire life experience and life cycle of the girl. Girls’ Education is multi-sectoral – it intersects with a variety of issues, including water and sanitation, child protection, justice, livelihoods and health – and our interventions should therefore be framed in these multi-dimensional (and inter-generational) terms. Education does not take place in a vacuum – the MGCubed programme acknowledges and helps to deal with the wider factors that influence the life of a girl at any one time and affects her education. For instance, this has included confronting menstruation-related sanitation issues that impact on attendance as part of our Wonder Women sessions, breaking the dominance of boys in some classrooms through activities that promote girl leaders, and providing timely sex education to girls at risk of early pregnancy. Taking such an approach requires skilled teachers who are able to interact with girls in a responsive and sensitive way, and who possess an understanding and appreciation of the barriers girls face in obtaining a quality education. 4

Adolescence starts in primary school

Many adolescent girls still go to primary school up to the age of fifteen and sometimes beyond, particularly in areas where secondary places are very limited or non-existent. Although our girls’ education project in Ghana focuses on primary school students, we work with

marginalised students, one characteristic of which is often overage for a school grade. Where policy is shifting towards the transition of girls from childhood to adolescent, it should be remembered that many adolescent girls are still in primary school, and are in particular need of education interventions to help them catch up with other students their age. To this end, we are continually assessing the appropriateness of the content of our classes, in particular the afterschool Wonder Women sessions. 4

We can improve how we measure impact in Girls’ Education

If we truly consider the life-cycle of the girl and the myriad of influences involved in this, we also need to move beyond only measuring basic educational outcomes. English, literacy and mathematics skills are of course essential and we need to measure them carefully to assess educational impact. They are not the whole story, however. We are thinking more ambitiously about the kinds of measures that are genuinely useful in these policy debates, but are also more genuinely reflective of the changes we see on the ground. This includes self-confidence, assertiveness, inter-personal relations, financial acumen, mental preparedness and resilience, and parenting skills. We need to find ways of measuring these softer skills that will transform young women’s lives. Teachers are part of this changing landscape and need to be au fait with existing and emerging approaches to assessing these wider, “softer” changes. In order that teachers can best help efforts to observe and record these kinds of changes in girls it is critical that indicators can be understood by teachers themselves. 4

Engaging with parents and the community is not easy, but is essential

The importance of working with parents and the wider community cannot be highlighted enough. In encouraging a supportive, protective school environment for girls we need to support the structures that can hold schools to account. Buy-in to girls’ education is currently a major barrier. We know from our work in Ghana that

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students without strong parental support are at an extreme disadvantage: there are a myriad of costs associated with going to school and children rely on their parents to provide this support. Where parents are not there, or are not supportive, girls are more likely to see their education sacrificed. Mobilising the wider community and engaging at this level can be tricky and we need to be realistic: in Ghana we are changing the rules of the game in many households by asking their children to stay at school for an additional 2 hours. We are also dealing with communities where the use of a cane is accepted and expected. We tread very carefully within communities and have been supported hugely by local district officials. We involve parents in Community Committees to ensure they can participate and hold us to account, too. In a 2016 survey for MGCubed, we spoke to 121 community members. 89 percent of them reported that they perceive Wonder Woman sessions are addressing community needs. In the future the aim is to better integrate parents, for instance by offering them the opportunity to access skills training tailored to local labour market demand and opportunity.

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Incentivising Out of School Girls to re-enrol is possible, but joint responsibility needs to be taken to address barriers to learning

Once a girl drops out of school, this is not the end of the story. We are proud to say that we have helped over 30 Out of School Girls (out of a total of 130) to return to school. We worked hard with the local community to identify the girls who were most at risk and encourage them to attend our Wonder Women after school clubs. It is testament to the quality and relevance of our after-school sessions that so many of them decided to go back to school. A key part of this is the use of role modelling, where successful women are invited to attend sessions. Feedback from the girls indicates that this has been an incredibly powerful technique when combined with the daily interactions with trained facilitators and Varkey Foundation studio teachers in Accra.

In our experience, we however have realized that some other barriers need to be addressed to make learning possible and more effective. Through the intervention a number of OOS girls have returned back to school, we are in many cases faced with the challenge of supporting them with resources such as school uniforms, feeding money, books, printing fees etc. Without these resources they are either unable to enrol in school or drop out again after a while.

In Ghana, over 20 percent of our Out of School Girls have already re-enrolled in school. Over half are seriously considering reenrolling in the near future.

These are the very real challenges that short circuit many efforts to get girls back to school. Often, addressing these challenges are beyond the remit (and budget) of implementing partners. Donors need to take this into account and be ready to address these challenges through funding, so that child poverty does not persist in being a barrier to accessing education. 4

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Do not ignore the role of boys in Girls’ Education

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One size definitely does not fit all: we must cater to different abilities

A key lesson which emerged early on was that while the MGCubed project was focused on girls, within a short space of time we had identified that there was a huge demand from boys to be included in the after-school sessions and – critically – be made aware of what the MGCubed project was about. We saw this as an opportunity, both for collecting information about how boys perceive changes in girls as a result of our interventions and for actively engaging boys in a similar way we are doing with girls at the afterschool Wonder Women sessions.

The results of our Midline evaluation demonstrated that when it came to the content of our daily Maths and English classes we were not catering for the broad range of ability across the four grades included in the lessons. We needed to reflect the different ages and abilities amongst primary schoolchildren, so decided to split the lessons into Basic and Intermediate streams. We worked quickly to adapt the content of our lessons to reflect this split, and look forward to seeing some of the results of this action in our Endline results.

We now hold “Boys Boys” after school clubs, focusing on personal issues and geared towards developing their inter-personal skills. We are at the early stages of assessing the kinds of impact this has, but are working to monitor these effects over the next year. The sessions have also provided us with a new perspective on the changes being demonstrated by MGCubed girls as a result of our interventions.

4 Technology holds the key to opening up quality education to hard-to-reach girls, but the technical support must be there.


In both our T4T and MGCubed projects, technology is used as a means of reaching a wide audience of both pupils (MGCubed) and teachers (T4T). However we are still learning how to maximise our investment and ensure technical problems do not affect our projects. We monitor our technical equipment daily, and seek feedback from schools on how they are responding to the technology. We are honest about its limitations: at present, 20 percent of the Head Teachers surveyed as part of our external evaluation for

MGCubed say that power outages due to extreme weather conditions are a challenge. On the flipside, this means that 80 percent do not see it as a huge challenge, which for a country like Ghana is a major breakthrough - we are disrupting the traditional way of educating children. 4

An active role for in-country donors is essential

Global education programmes such as the Girls’ Education Challenge offer considerable opportunities for country-level donor representative to engage and actively use the important data to emerge from often small-scale pilot interventions. Donors such as DFID have an incredibly important role to play in-country, helping to facilitate the sustainability of these interventions (for instance, through brokering partnerships with country level programme partners) where possible. It is critical that global programmes and country programmes do not exist side-by-side at country level but are encouraged and supported to complement and inform each other. 4

Proven interventions should be funded over longer timeframes

Lastly, learning and empowerment interventions take relatively long periods to show their full results, which we have seen in our literacy intervention in MGCubed, and longer timeframes for projects allow a higher chance of

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sustainability than short term projects. Knowing that a project will be funded for several years allows for longer term planning and monitoring, and creates better buy-in and sustainability. In Ghana, for example, it takes 6 years to complete primary school. If you intervene for two years, for instance primary 2 – 3, the chances that a pupil’s improved learning outcomes will be sustained beyond grade 6 for transition into the Junior high school is very low. This means the longer term effect may not be realized or achieved. Yet, it makes sense to still start from lower primary because that is where greater impact can be made - but any intervention will have to be long enough to make more lasting impact. Failing this, the evaluation period could be extended to ensure that even if an intervention is relatively short, its efficacy is being assessed over a longer period. A robust body of longitudinal education data on the sustainability interventions over time is lacking (Unterhalter et al, 2014), therefore contributions which focus specifically on attempts to support girls’ education over a longer are a worthwhile investment for donors.

The Varkey Foundation commits to supporting Girls’ Education

The Varkey Foudation endorses DFID’s Statement of Action for Girls’ Education and pledges to support these priorities. We also offer a commitment to specific endeavours in relation to our work in Ghana and Uganda. In line with DFID’s focus areas, over the next five years we seek to:

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Scale up our support for marginalised girls and young women women

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Scale up our current projects offering girls’ education and teacher training to teachers in Ghana to up to 600 school hubs (approximately 40,000 girls) in the next five years. These projects have already demonstrated an improvement in positive, gender-equitable learning environments in the schools we work with, and have had a large, positive impact on learning outcomes, which has been particularly strong in mathematics, with girls and students in lower grades showing the greatest gains in numeracy;

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Continue to run Wonder Women girls’ clubs in all MGCubed project schools to introduce girls to inspirational Role Models and allow them to play a part in shaping their education and life chances. These clubs have already shown an impact on girls’ aspirations and self-esteem, with more girls in our schools volunteering for leadership positions, taking active roles in lessons, and setting up clubs themselves.

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Increase financing for marginalised girls’ education

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Establish partnerships with ICT, satellite connectivity and solar power providers to support the sustainability of their projects in Ghana and Uganda. The Varkey Foundation is primarily a provider of high quality education and teacher training, and believes that partnerships between businesses and the third sector will allow for growth that keeps our focus on girls and their education;

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Create formal partnerships with the government of Ghana and Uganda to aid the future roll out of our projects and secure their in-kind contributions to future programming.

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Build data and evidence for gender equitable planning and programming

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Learn from the results of the external evaluations currently being conducted on our projects in Ghana to refine and improve our girls’ education and teacher training provision. The Varkey Foundation believes that all projects must have demonstrable impact, and with this view, is undertaking both a randomised controlled trial and a longitudinal analysis of its projects in the country. These have shown improvements in literacy, numeracy, and self-esteem in students, and improvements in teaching practices across the schools we work with. They have also highlighted areas for improvement which we commit to addressing as we scale the project further;


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Continue to conduct ongoing monitoring of our projects, using our own project staff and our comprehensive database. We currently collect data on beneficiary numbers, attendance, improvement in learning outcomes and the technology we deploy. This constant feedback loop allows us to make changes to project design as the need arises, and will allow a more nuanced design for our future work, as well as giving us data to contribute to the wider policy framework and debate.

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Reduce barriers to marginalised girls’ education

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Continue to work with those most marginalised in society. Our projects currently focus on marginalised students – those who are overage for their grade, live more than 30 minutes’ walking distance from school, who have more than 5 siblings, and students who have a history of non-attendance. We are currently working with 6,000 girls who are at risk of not completing their education, and would like to more than double this number in the first year of project scale up.

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Retain a focus on out of school girls. Our project in Ghana runs girls’ clubs, which allow safe spaces for girls who have dropped out, often due to early pregnancy, to transition back into the school system. These girls’ clubs have already resulted in over 30 girls re-entering formal education. We will seek to at least double this number, and create partnerships with local systems to ensure support of these girls once they are back in school to reduce barriers to their education. In Uganda we seek to use our Model Schools initiative to act as strategic advisors to selected schools, working to strengthen their gender sensitivity and pilot school-level projects to identify and support marginalized girls.

The Varkey Foundation will actively monitor, evaluate, and share its progress on these commitments on an annual basis, as part of its wider commitment to be an active and responsive participant within the Girls’ Education movement.

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Recommendations to donors and national governments

Based on our experience of what works in the field, we would like to make the following recommendations to donors and governments: To donors

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1.

Look further than narrow testing to assess outcomes: Donors should support initiatives that both develop and utilise measures of learning, ‘beyond the basics.’ Maths and reading are important foundation skills. But for girls and young women to thrive they will also need excellent communication skills, a strongly positive self-image, and the ability to manage their time and resources effectively. We need to measure and reward these skills.

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Look to pilot scaleable models: Donors should promote and support innovations that have the potential to scale up in an affordable and sustainable way to reach the poorest and most marginalised children, based on evidence from pilot projects.

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Sustain support: Donors should sustain their support over a longer period of time in order to allow partners to employ long-term vision, for instance over a six year period over two donor funding cycles. It takes this long to bring about lasting and sustainable change in girls learning. In this way donors will support the generation of more reliable and informative evidence from pilots.


To national and regional governments 4.

National and regional governments should seek out and support partnerships with a wide range of partners to help to improve the learning and confidence of girls and young women. Governments should set themselves specific targets to improve girls’ learning - determined not only by narrowly-defined learning outcomes in maths and reading. To do so governments need to set aside budgets to support interventions that have been shown to work. This will bring lasting benefit to the communities and, importantly, the economy.

3. References Atta, G.P. (2015), ‘Education Inequality: How Patriarchy and Policy Collide in Ghana’, International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 7(1): 11-19 Bah, Chernoh (2015), ‘Girls’ education is the global civil rights issue of our time’, The Guardian Global Development Professionals Network, 11th October 2015. Accessed 23rd June 2016: http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/oct/11/girls-educationglobal-civil-rights-issue Basic Education Coalition (2004), Teach a child transform a nation, Washington, DC: Basic Education Coalition. Education First Initiative (2012), Global Education First Initiative, Paris: UNESCO. EFA Global Monitoring Report (2015), Gender and EFA 2000-2015: Achievements and Challenges. EFA Global Monitoring Report 2015. Paris: UNESCO. Education for All (2013), EFA Global Monitoring Report 2013. Teaching and Learning: Achieving Quality for All, Paris: UNESCO. Education for All (2012), EFA Global Monitoring Report 2012. Youth and Skills: Putting Education to Work, Paris: UNESCO. Lambert, M.,Perrino, E. S. & Barreras, E. S. (2012).Understanding the barriers to female education in Ghana. Retrieved from www.bluekitabu.org/blue-kitabu.../understanding_the_barriers_.pdf Lloyd CB, El Tawila S, Clark W, Mensch B (2003) The impact of educational quality onschool exit in Egypt. Comparative Education Review 47(4): 444-467 Patrinos, Harry Anthony, and George Psacharopoulos (2013). ‘Education: The income and equity loss of not having a faster rate of human capital accumulation’. In How Much Have Global Problems Cost the World? A scorecard from 1900 to 2050, edited by Bjørn Lomborg. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge. University Press. Sperling, Gene B., Winthrop, Rebecca (2016), What Works in Girls’ Education: Evidence for the World’s Best Investment. Washington D.C: Brookings Institution Press. UNESCO Institute for Statistics and Education for All Global Monitoring Report (2015), ‘A growing number of children and adolescents are out of school as aid fails to meet the mark’, Policy Paper 22/Fact Sheet 31. Montreal/Paris: UNESCO Institute for Statistics/EFA Global Monitoring Report. Unterhalter E, Heslop J, Mamedu A (2013) Girls claiming education rights: reflections on distribution, empowerment and gender justice in Northern Tanzania and Northern Nigeria. International Journal of Educational Development 33(6): 566-575. Unterhalter, E., North, A., Arnot, M., Lloyd, C., Moletsane, L., Murphy-Graham, E., Parkes, J., Mioko, S. (2014), Girls’ Education Rigorous Literature Review, London: DFID. World Bank (2012), World Development Report: Gender Equality and Development. Washington D.C: World Bank. Wydick B, Glewwe P, Rutledge L (2013) Does international child sponsorship work? A six country study of impacts on adult life outcomes. Journal of Political Economy 121(2): 393-436.

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