Introducing life skills development programming in schools in post-conflict areas of Uganda

• In Event: Developing life skills among youth: programmatic approaches and research evidence

Proposal

Despite concerted universal secondary education efforts in Uganda, girls’ secondary enrollment is still low—at 22 percent in 2015 (UNESCO). Girls’ participation in secondary education is even more circumscribed in post-conflict areas in Uganda, where they face a variety of deeply entrenched access barriers. These include school-level barriers, including long distances to secondary schools, limited ability to pay school fees, and poor teaching and school quality. These are compounded by the effects of the considerable hardship and trauma these young women have endured and continue to endure. Several are orphaned, having lost their parents to conflict, and are living in camps where they experience high levels of insecurity. Others live in extreme poverty and face endemic family and cultural barriers, including harmful beliefs about the role of girls in their families and communities, early marriage and pregnancy, and the lack of role models or mentors. Still more destructive of these young women’s lives are widespread human trafficking, sexual exploitation, and HIV prevalence.

CEDA International is working with secondary school girls in these areas to equip them with the vital skills they need to tackle these challenges head-on, and become successful, motivated adults following secondary school. It collaborates with teachers in target schools to conduct social and leadership skills sessions, provides vocational and entrepreneurship training, and organizes community dialogues. CEDA has developed a tailored approach to social and leadership skills development, the “5-D Cycle,” which enables young women to Discover who they are, Dream about what they want in the future, Design goals and action plans, and Develop key skills and habits that will lead them to rewarding Destinies.

CEDA undertook a one-year, pre-post, mixed-methods evaluation to measure the influence of its programming, finding that its multi-component effort led to (1) increased commitment to school among beneficiaries, (2) improvements in students’ confidence and belief in themselves, (3) newly developed entrepreneurial skills, and (4) changing perspectives among teachers, school staff, and parents around education for girls. Given the success of the program, and the encouraging findings, CEDA is identifying concrete lessons around program sustainability and scalability, the focus of this presentation. CEDA will discuss, in particular, its transition from working with external facilitators or mentors to working with teachers, within the school system. It will identify the benefits for program continuity—including limited teacher attrition and reduced gaps between the messaging in life skills sessions and classroom instruction. It will also discuss potential risks—including limited teacher motivation to take on new responsibilities, and the difficulty teachers have in “walking back” their instincts to teach and instead learning to listen and facilitate. Finally, CEDA will share and discuss the range of practical solutions it has developed to tackle these issues, including easy-to-implement teacher recognition strategies and approaches for helping teachers quickly learn how to facilitate experiential life skills development activities. These solutions and strategies can play a critical role in increasing the scalability of life skills programming and its integration into the educational system.

Author

• Rehmah Kasule, Century Entrepreneurship Development Agency