School Feeding & Literacy in Guinea-Bissau

• In Event: Hungry Minds: Evaluation of School Feeding and Literacy Interventions

Proposal

Guinea-Bissau is a small West African coastal nation situated between Senegal and Guinea and extending north to the Sahel. It is one of the world’s poorest countries, ranked on the United Nations Human Development Index at 175 out of 188 countries. Portuguese is the official language of Guinea-Bissau, but it is estimated that less than one-fifth of the population speaks Portuguese. Guinea-Bissau’s education system lacks resources for school materials and educational infrastructure as well as sufficiently trained and qualified teachers. Less than half of the population over the age of 15 can read and write.
In 2019, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) awarded Catholic Relief Services (CRS) Guinea-Bissau a $17 million, four-year McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition program. The MeREECE project—Promotion of Educational and Economic Performance in Educative Communities, or Melhoria do Rendimento Escolar e Economico das Comunidades Educativas (MeREECE)—runs from September 23, 2019, to September 30, 2023. This program targets 321 primary schools and will be implemented in the regions of Bafata, Cacheu, Gabu, Quinara, and Oio.
This paper summarizes the methodology and findings of the baseline evaluation. The baseline’s main objective is to assess and report on the situation in the five target regions prior to the start of MeREECE interventions. The results obtained from this evaluation will serve as a point of comparison for the midterm and final evaluations
The project explored evaluation approaches used in similar programs and identified the most rigorous evaluation plan possible―subject to time, quality, resources, and country context constraints. For ethical reasons and logistical reasons, the project and funder decided that a non-experimental performance evaluation is the most feasible and appropriate approach.
At baseline, a two-stage cluster sampling approach was used to select schools and school-based respondents randomly in the five MeREECE intervention regions of Bafata, Cacheu, Gabu, Quinara, and Oio. In the first stage, schools were selected at random, proportionally to the population of schools by region. In the second stage, enumerators selected students at random within each school. The sample included 90 schools in the baseline sample with a target of 20 students per school. At each sampled school, enumerators administered one survey to the school director, completed one school observation, and conducted one observation of a Grade 2 classroom. Additionally, enumerators administered a baseline Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) to 20 students in Grade 3 to measure their core reading skills. These Grade 3 students serve as a proxy for end-of-Grade 2 students as their exposure to Grade 3 instruction was minimal at the time of the evaluation.
Overall student performance was extremely low, but the evaluation offered the opportunity to revise and improve project design, as well as explore opportunities for improved data collection a midline and endline.

Author

• Candace Debnam, School-to-School International