Assessing Education Programming in Response to Conflict in the Kasai, Democratic Republic of Congo, through a Mid-Term RERA

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday IV)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Using data to understand and design for the two way relationship between conflict or crisis and education: two tools from USAID and partners

Proposal

The USAID/UKAID-funded ACCELERE!1 (A!1) activity (Accès, Lecture, Retention et Redevabilité or access, reading, retention, and accountability) is a five-year initiative that aims to improve educational outcomes for boys and girls in select education provinces in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). A!1 supports access, reading, and governance activities in 2,718 formal schools and non-formal accelerated learning schools in 26 education sub-divisions across eight DRC provinces: Haut-Katanga, Lualaba, Kasaï-Central, Kasaï-Oriental, Equateur, Sud-Ubangi, North Kivu, and South Kivu. A!1 has approximately one-third of its target schools in two Kasai provinces (Central and Oriental). At the outset of the A!1 program in 2015, the Kasai provinces had no political unrest. By the second and third project years, militia activity and violence was at its peak and the project struggled to respond appropriately. To better understand how A!1 could use limited resources to improve education in the Kasai during the conflict, the project conducted a Rapid Education Risk Analysis (RERA) in May 2018.

Unlike most RERAs, the RERA conducted in the Kasais was a mid-program RERA and thus served to inform A!1 on how to better respond to the needs of targeted students, teachers, families, and school communities affected by the violence in the Kasaïs, and whether to adjust ongoing project activities. Also, the RERA was not designed to use findings to add significant new interventions or funding but rather to also identify and support areas of resilience.

In this presentation we will share findings and recommendations aimed at project implementation for the remaining year and half as well as at funders for future programming. The themes that emerged and fully informed ongoing program activities were in the areas of violence within and outside of schools, gender-based violence, trauma, schooling, infrastructure, and leadership. In this presentation we will also describe the methodology, the in-depth process of contextualizing questions and codes into French and local language (Ciluba), challenges around security and access, and the types of trade-off decisions we had to make regarding sample sizing and selection criteria of enumerators.

Authors

• Sonia Arias, Chemonics International

• Jordene Hale, Chemonics International