Education is not only a human right in itself, but also a primary vehicle for people to raise themselves out of poverty and to gain the ability to participate fully in their communities. Want to empower girls through education or want to develop your own proposal on the related subject? This project is specifically design to strengthened capacities of girls and boys, parents, community leaders and government officials on girls’ right to education; increased financing opportunities for girls’ education; strengthened capacity of service providers for addressing girls’ sexual and reproductive health needs; improved gender-responsive school environment for girls and boys; strengthened capacity of girls and boys relating to sexual reproductive health and self-protection against violence. This project is not a girls-only project since the aim is to address gender inequalities in education based on the local contexts of the target communities.
Project Summary
The project will contribute towards the above aim through: strengthened capacities of girls and boys, parents, community leaders and government officials on girls’ right to education; increased financing opportunities for girls’ education; strengthened capacity of service providers for addressing girls’ sexual and reproductive health needs; improved gender-responsive school environment for girls and boys; strengthened capacity of girls and boys relating to sexual reproductive health and self-protection against violence. We recognize that in most communities, girls suffer disproportionate inequalities with regards to their rights to education. Whereas there is usually greater parity with enrolment rates, more girls drop out of school and do not transit to secondary schools. The project will work with the duty bearers, communities, girls and boys to address the underlying barriers to girls’ education. This project is not a girls-only project since the aim is to address gender inequalities in education based on the local contexts of the target communities. Rallying all stakeholders as promoters of gender equalities is likely to yield better results than having a girl’s specific project in isolation of the underlying issues. This proposed project will directly impact over more than 15,000 girls and over 75,000 people over the three years.
Project Rationale
Education is not only a human right in itself, but also a primary vehicle for people to raise themselves out of poverty and to gain the ability to participate fully in their communities. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by Kenya, states that all children have a right to good quality education that is effective, relevant, non-discriminatory and culturally appropriate. The Education Act (1968) places the responsibility of education promotion and development on the Minister for Education. The Act provides the legislation and policy framework for the establishment, management and quality assurance of education in Kenya. The national education policy emphasizes the right of every child to education, obliging the government and parents as the key duty bearers to fulfill this right. The Act emphasizes and promotes equal education opportunities for girls and boys, with the need to address cultural, religious and other forms of biases particularly against girls. However, Kenya’s basic education sector continues to experience gender disparity where girls are more disadvantaged, with major social cultural factors including early child marriage, Female Genital Mutilation and child labour. While household poverty is also a contributing factor, preference of boys’ education compared to that of girls’ by parents and communities is more dominant in deciding who should continue. These social cultural factors impact on girls’ access, participation and transition as illustrated by education statistics. While national data indicates high rate of gross enrolment (109.8%), the completion rate is lower at 79.5% with evident gender disparity between 75.3% of girls and 85.1% of boys. Poverty at household level continues to be a major factor preventing transition to secondary school, with MOE 2008 data indicating a transition rate of 67.3% for girls. Of those over 30% of girls who drop out post primary school, other main reasons for this include marriage, pregnancy and discrimination against poor girls in the allocation of bursaries from Decentralized Funds Committees. The project aims to address the following barriers to enrolment, transition and completion of quality education for girls:
- Parents’ and guardians’ negative attitudes towards girls’ education
- Low household income – Over 65% of the population in proposed project area are poor.
- High prevalence of HIV and AIDS in Bondo – which contributes to high household poverty and predisposition to child labour.
- High absenteeism by teachers, understaffing and disruption of learning and quality of education for both boys and girls
- Social cultural beliefs and practices such as female genital mutilation and early marriages
- Teenage pregnancies due to early sexual debut, early marriages and apathy
- Unfavorable school environment, including violence in schools, inadequate infrastructure and poor support to children with disabilities (with regard to barrier-free environment and teaching materials and processes).
- Inadequate policy enforcement – there are good policies e.g. re-entry of teenage mothers into school, prohibition of corporal punishment in schools, special allocation for children with disabilities within the Free Primary Education Program, etc. However, as these policies are not disseminated effectively, most parents and children are not aware and this limits their abilities to hold the duty-bearers to account.
- Inadequate distribution of resources, including unequal deployment of teachers, misallocation of resources and poor governance of school development projects and funds.
- This project prioritizes three key strategic areas: improving equal access, enhancing quality and strengthening education governance.
- The project will specifically seek to address the identified barriers to girls’ right to education through the following key interventions:
- Intergenerational dialogue and awareness on girls’ right to education, social cultural barriers and attitudes towards girls’ education.
- Reflection and action learning to assess education and gender equality policies with government officials – to ascertain their impact on girls’ right to education
- Participatory analysis/action research on cultural practices and their impact on gender equality in relation to education
- Capacity building of parent teacher associations, school management committees, rights of children (ROC) clubs on gender and education
- Mapping and sharing of information on existing financing opportunities for girls’ education
- Facilitating participatory social audits with a focus on gender equality in education, particularly girls’ right to education and gender responsive learning environments, enrolment, drop-out, transition and performance among boys and girls, attitudes towards girls and boys, etc.
- Advocate and lobby county and national government to disseminate and ensure effective implementation of adolescent reproductive health policy in schools and communities
- Engage with cultural on gender and reproductive issues and the impact of some cultural practices (female genital mutilation and child marriages) on girls’ rights to education
- Support peer-to-peer learning and talks on HIV and AIDs and sexual reproductive health among girls and boys
- Life skills training on interpersonal and psychosocial issues – including self-awareness, self-esteem, coping with emotions, coping with stress and peer pressure resistance, interpersonal relationships, friendship formation and maintenance, peaceful conflict resolution, assertiveness, negotiation, effective communication and empathy, decision making, problem solving and creative thinking.
Country Strategy (ies) and Policies
The project will be informed by several policies, among them: Gender and education Policy The policy emphasizes development of modalities for reducing gender disparities in education, with a focus on girls and teachers gender distribution. It aims at improving policy management and learning environments to make them more gender friendly and ensure that the primary education curriculum development, implementation, supervision and assessment address gender issues. It seeks to work with communities to provide, rehabilitate and expand sanitation facilities, create an enabling environment and coordinate stake holders’ participation in the provision of girls’ education. Kenya Adolescent Reproductive Health and Development Policy The policy recognizes the critical roles adolescents themselves can play in promoting their own health and development and emphasizes the need for their participation in decision making, planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of programmes. It also reaffirms the role of parents, communities, education institutions and religious organizations in assisting children to develop positive norms, attitudes and values. Plan will facilitate participatory reviews of the Gender and Education policies to identify areas that may need improvement. Gaps identified through this process will form part of advocacy activities focused on national level policy issues.
Target Group
Direct Beneficiaries:
- This project primarily aims to reach girls aged 10 to 14 in upper primary school and adolescent girls aged between 15 to 18 years as they transit to secondary schools or tertiary institutions (e.g. polytechnics). While the focus of the project is on girls education, it will work with boys, men and women for promotion of gender equality
- The selection of the direct beneficiaries is justified by the Participatory Situational Analysis carried out in 2009 in the four Program Units. The schools targeted by this project were selected through a participative process involving children, communities, Ministry of Education, and other stakeholders in project area.
Project Design
Approach and Effectiveness
The project will address barriers to girls’ education through prioritizing the three strategic areas of: access, quality and education governance. This project aims to identify and develop the capacity of girls, boys, government officials, and community leaders, who can sustainably advocate gender equality and support in the evaluation of existing government and community structures on how they promote or inhibit equal access to education. Gender analysis will be carried out through intergenerational dialogues to facilitate better understanding on the gender divisions of labour, decision making roles, access, control and benefits, so providing an enhanced understanding of beliefs and practices, and institutional arrangements that promote or hinder discrimination against girls. Targeted interventions will seek to address barriers at family, community and government levels, as well as building the confidence and skills of girls to participate in education and in decision making processes.
Value for Money
It is important that projects provide good value for money (e.g. costs per beneficiary, % of costs on activities compared to running costs). Please explain in what way your project will offer the maximum benefit for the resources requested. What alternative approaches could have been applied and why have they been ruled out?
The project will provide value for money. The project value for money cannot be quantified but it can be derived from the relevance of the project to the direct and indirect beneficiaries, the sustainability of projects interventions and by its intention to reach girls as a marginalized group but that has potential for multiplier effects.
Beneficiary Involvement
Please specify how the project beneficiaries will be involved in the implementation, management and monitoring of the project.
The project recognizes the critical roles adolescents themselves can play in promoting their own health and development, and emphasizes the need for their participation in decision making, planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of programs addressing their own needs.
The Family and the Community
Maintain the traditional role of supporting and moulding adolescents’ lives, whilst also being challenged by emerging socio-economic and cultural challenges.
Advocate promote, and support this project’s implementation and the provision of information and services to the girls and boys.
Support fully the integration of girls’ rights to education into the social, legislative and policy development agenda and support the eradication of un-favourable socio-cultural practices that promote gender inequality in education and violence against girls.
Children and Adolescents
Seek appropriate information for themselves and enhance awareness of issues related to consumption of alcohol and harmful drugs.
Mobilize individuals, leaders and the community to support the implementation of the project using existing structures in folk media and modern theatre.
Articulate adolescent reproductive health issues to the public and other stakeholders.
Take the initiative to make responsible life decisions and positively change their sexual and reproductive health behaviors, seek and utilize ARH counselling, information and services.
Project Sustainability
This is a long-term intervention which requires strong partnerships. To achieve sustainability, Plan will work in partnership with the Ministry of Education, Public Health and Sanitation; stakeholders and structures at local level; and women’s rights organizations. The project has a strong component of capacity strengthening, governance and advocacy aimed at ensuring that boys, girls, communities and other stakeholders are equipped with key skills to ensure sustained change. The project aims to build girls’ rights advocates who are respected and passionate about gender equality, and who will continue to promote girls’ right to education even after the termination of the project.
Cross Cutting Issues
Gender Equality:
The project explicitly seeks to address girls’ rights to access quality education by tackling numerous barriers to this – including limited value assigned to girls’ education by parents, inhibitive cultural practices e.g. child marriages and female genital mutilation, and ineffective policy implementation for the promotion of girls’ education.
By targeting girls in most of this project’s interventions, we hope to contribute to their empowerment through increased knowledge and skills,. In particular, the project seeks to enhance their life-skills and self-protection, to address their limited participation in leadership and decision making processes around matters affecting their lives.
Age:
Efforts will be made to strengthen capacities of children, parents, teachers, community members, religious and political leaders, service providers, relevant institutions, and other stakeholders in order to respond to issues affecting adolescent boys and girls.
Excluded Groups
- People with Disabilities
- Persons with disabilities are generally a marginalized group, with the issue further compounded if they are adolescents. To address their needs the following strategic actions are proposed:
- Promote disaggregated data collection, analysis and use in programming.
- Enhance the capacities of institutions, individuals and teachers to respond to the special needs of adolescents with disabilities, through integration with other Plan programmes.
- Ensure that the project makes a deliberate effort to be entirely inclusive, particularly for girls with disabilities.
- Promote access to reproductive health information and services for adolescent girls with disabilities.
Project Management and Implementation
- Project Management
- The project will be implemented by Organizations, overall strategic leadership from the Country Director and members of the Country Management Team. The Strategic Programme Support Manager, who is also part of the CMT, will provide strategic programmatic oversight to the project. In each PU, the Education Programme Coordinator will be responsible for oversight for project coordination. The Programme Coordinator will supervise project officers who will be responsible for day to day project implementation and monitoring. In each PU, the project will receive technical support from Programme Coordinators – Health, and Inclusion and Protection, particularly on program activities related to sexual reproductive health and protection, respectively. The programme will also be supported by a team of programme, grants and finance staff at the country office level, including a Monitoring and Evaluation Manager, Governance Coordinator, Advocacy Coordinator, Child Protection Advisor, and Resource Mobilization Coordinator. The finance and grants team at the country office level will provide support to ensure compliance to donor requirements and reporting, including timely and quality reporting.
Below are the key staff who will be involved in the project:
- 4 Program Officers
- 4 Program Coordinators – Education
- 4 Program Coordinators – Inclusion and Protection
- All the above positions are within the proposed structure.
The following are the equipment proposed for this project: 2 Motorbike, 3 Laptops
Monitoring, Evaluation, Lesson Learning and Building Support for Development in the UK Implementing agency will commission country-level coordinated baseline studies in the first year of the Country Strategic Plan to inform benchmarks and targets for purpose and output indicators. The baselines will support monitoring and assessment of project achievements. Following the baseline, the quantitative and qualitative indicators in the project logical framework will be refined to incorporate the benchmarks more specifically and in a measurable form.
Organization will use the Annual Participatory Programme Reviews (APPRs) to monitor and assess progress towards realizing the project’s objectives, alongside stories of change for learning purposes. Participatory monitoring and evaluation methods such as Participatory Action Research and the Most Significant Change (MSC) technique, will be employed to capture most significant changes that have resulted from project implementation. An end term evaluation will be undertaken to assess the project’s achievements against the set results.
Implementing agency will undertake action research to accumulate evidence and strengthen advocacy interventions, as well as to support learning, monitoring and evaluation. Organization will partner with local and international academic, research and media institutions to facilitate research, documentation and communication of the project’s experiences with wider audiences.
