Experiences from the grassroot organizations on their engagement with RELI: The Power and Value of Collaboration

• In Event: Sustainable Networking for Strengthened collective impact for Education

Proposal

Since early 2018, the Values and Life Skills (VaLi) thematic cluster of the Regional Education Learning Initiative (RELI) has identified with the need for strengthening the integration and development of 21st Century skills and commenced work around this. To this effect, two member organisations, drawing from their expertise undertook a survey that set out to better understand the degree of interventions of RELI partners. A LifeSkills Survey Report (October, 2018) was derived out of the need to understand the degree of intervention of RELI member partners working on life skills aspects in Uganda to map out a few life skills of mutual interest for collaboration purposes. This was also driven by the need to single out learning needs (such as challenges, best practises etc.); assessment; and implementation methodologies of the organizations involved. Beyond complementing their technical abilities to execute this activity, with one entity leading the tool development while the other focussed on data analysis and report drafting.
This effort was to result into a bigger and scalable regional initiative, ALIVE where more than 20 Civil Society Organizations have committed to collaborate in deepening understanding of members on values and life skills and developing contextualised assessments for the same.
A Midline Report of the School /Community-based Project - Do It Yourself (DIY) activity by the former set out to study the impact of one of the main programs of a grass roots RELI Uganda member organisation that sets out to facilitate radical change in the Ugandan health and education systems by leveraging youth leadership. By extending this technical expertise, the former was not only able utilise recommendations from the evaluation to realign and adapt their leadership programme, but also improve on the Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning skills.

The collaborative POWER built over time has equipped and readied member organisations to respond to unprecedented crisis in the sector for example in response to the distorted calendar occasioned by the longest school closure that has ever been experienced. The Grassroots nest for Innovations for Change (GRIC) Baseline Assessment Report (2022) highlights a great example of two grass roots RELI member organisations, one being Ugandan and the other being Kenya based worked together to share and learn but also impact others. The partnership has played a vital role in how Uganda is responding to the distorted education calendar and extends support to five other partners with their core pillars of: Improving student learning outcomes. As part of this collaboration, the Kenya-based RELI member commissioned a baseline evaluation that assessed the level of access, quality, and capacity of community grassroots organizations to support community-based education. The study findings have been disseminated widely and provide an opportunity to implement innovative approaches to learning, monitor, track and evaluate progress of the community-based education project in four rural districts in Northern Uganda.

Author

• Emmanuel Lubaale, Regional Education Learning Initiative Africa (RELI)