Strengthening Teachers’ Capacity for Improved Learning Outcomes

• In Event: Professional development for learners in uncertain and changing social/global environments

Proposal

Egypt is home to 289,493 refugees and asylum-seekers from 65 countries; approximately 37% of these refugees and asylum-seekers are children. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) registers and documents refugees and asylum-seekers and facilitates their access to protection and basic services, such as health and education.1
Due to the political and economic instability in Africa and the Middle East, children, adolescents, and adults are abandoning their families and education in search of a safer future in a host nation. In addition to the financial obstacles and lack of access to services, they arrive in Egypt to face identity crises, cultural shocks, and social isolation because of the daily struggles they face, such as rejection from the host community, discrimination, and violence.
As a result, refugee communities, particularly Africans from Sudan and South Sudan, have established community-based schools to support the education of all refugees who do not have access to or do not wish to enroll in the public school system. Currently, Egypt is home to more than 130 Refugee Community schools, the majority of which are in Cairo.
Since education is the key to local integration, and as part of CRS' social responsibility, CRS recognized the gaps faced by these community-based schools to provide safe, relevant, and quality education, with the following being the most significant:
• Hiring community members who do not necessarily have teaching experience,
• Limited resources and instability of community schools which result in high turnover rates among teachers
• Teachers’ inability to respond to vulnerable refugee students’ social and emotional needs,
• Teachers’ limited capacity to address students’ different learning needs

This proposal will focus on the teachers' capacity-building model CRS used to fill the gaps through establishing community-based learning circles that cater to sustainable outcomes.
Consequently, CRS Egypt's Education Team has devised the following approaches to address the problem: 1) Designing needs-based teacher training, 2) Mobilizing community resources to implement the training, and 3) Establishing mentorship and accompaniment approaches to monitor and evaluate results.
The proposal will examine the significant outcomes and challenges of the community-led intervention in the light of the following questions:
- How community-based approaches can lead to sustainable results?
- To what extent empowering community teachers can stimulate their sense of ownership?
- How to enable vulnerable individuals (refugee teachers) to reach their full potential and in turn provide the necessary support to students?
Through strengthening teachers’ capacity, CRS was able to train 36 refugee community teachers who in turn were able to reach over 500 teachers in 66 refugee community schools through training packages and the establishment of learning circles that cover a wide range of topics, such as safeguarding, safety and security, gender in education, digital literacy, social and emotional learning, psycho-social first aid, and classroom management, amongst other topics
1.UNHCR Fact Sheet, June 2022.

Authors

• Nadine Sherif, Catholic Relief Services (CRS)

• Lama Waseb, Catholic Relief Services