Excelling Against the Odds, Ethiopia

• In Event: Adaptive management: girls’ education challenge transition baseline findings and their impact on project interventions in Zimbabwe and Ethiopia

Proposal

The project focuses on girls (16,481) at very high risk of early marriage, street-involvement, unaccompanied migration, exclusion because of disability, and heavy domestic labour in the rural areas of Amhara and Oromiya in Ethiopia.

In the first phase of GEC-1 (2013-2017) the project observed increases in enrolment and retention, self-esteem and self-efficacy of girls, which built their confidence to move on with their education, often in the face of negativity of those around them. In the final year of GEC-1 a spot check found 91.5% of all girls attending school. Moving into the second phase of GEC, when the project spoke to girls newly entering into secondary education they said that the safer environment created in GEC-1 had given them the confidence to keep moving on with their education – girls’ clubs and life skills sessions had provided safe spaces to discuss gender issues and barriers to education with adults who cared; good brothers’ clubs were helping boys to value their sisters’ education and promote it with their parents; letter link boxes were giving girls a confidential route for their safeguarding issues to be heard and dealt with.
These things were making the girls feel safer and more confident, but would they be enough to take them into secondary school and into the world of further education, business and work? Will they improve life chances through education and into independent adulthood?

GEC-T (2017 – 2021) is giving ChildHope and CHADET the opportunity to investigate further the connection between girls’ self-esteem and self-efficacy and their retention in school, their academic achievements, and their aspirations for the future. This is enabled through the girls feeling safer in school, having more trusted relationships with key school staff, and developed through teachers adopting a more equitable approach to teaching, attendance to the girls’ clubs, and being given the opportunity to express their views in the local community through drama and performance. By giving the girls a voice their self-confidence and drive to succeed academically and influence those around them grows.
ChildHope and CHADET will also be looking at how changes achieved within the project schools can be extended beyond the four-year project life-span and what the potential is to influence practice in more schools through increased collaboration with school leadership and education bureaus.

Author

• Angela Keenan, ChildHope