Community-led accelerated learning – ensuring those with disabilities can also catch up (in resource-constrained environments)

• In Event: All does mean ALL: Supporting girls and young women to be visible, enter education spaces and participate in decision making

Proposal

The Transformational Empowerment for Adolescent Marginalized (TEAM) Girl Project is a Link Education and Malawi government partnership to deliver a non-formal education system within Government policy, innovating on how community systems and networks can deliver quality education for the most marginalised (including those with learning difficulties and disabilities). 13% of the targeted 6,300 learners are with disabilities. Targeted learners are teens with no functional literacy and numeracy due to often multiple and intersecting barriers to learning, including poverty, early and unwanted marriage and motherhood, disability or being burdened with various household responsibilities such as childcare, child labour, and orphanhood.

The structuring of accelerated learning is largely decided by the community, which includes the time of learning, vetting facilitators/teachers, deciding on a learning centre, enrolling learners, daily care, home visits/follow-ups, safeguarding, social support and support of centre management, among the key.

The curriculum is delivered by community-based secondary school graduates, who apply a wide range of teaching methodologies to align with their learners' specific needs and nature, infusing their lived and community examples into teaching and role modelling to learners. A partnership with local-based disability specialist organisations conducts a learning ability/disability assessment to provide the facilitators with benching biographic data for each learner to adapt teaching methodologies. Parents of learners with special learning difficulties receive an assessment report in an Individual Education Plan, specifying their roles for home support towards learning achievements.

TEAM adopted an adaptive management approach that systematically emphasises continuous learning and adapting the project to complex environments, for the best learning outcomes for learners, through collaborative decision-making and places direct accountability with the communities and project beneficiaries at all levels.

Through midline and internal monitoring data, 90% of the CBE facilitators demonstrated adequate capacity to practise gender-responsive, inclusive and child-centred teaching methodologies (with differentiated learning approaches). Midline evaluation found that 88% of girls improved in reading and 86% improved in maths, significantly notable given the challenges and upheavals posed by COVID-19 and school closures; this was mostly driven by learning being community-led. 83% of girls showed improved life skills (social-emotional learning), enabling them to make life decisions. The Ministry of Education is monitoring the progress of these 6,300 learners to assess success to roll out the elements of the curriculum in future non-formal programs as Malawi develops the National Accelerated Learning (complementary basic education) policy.

This session will discuss how community experiences anchor learning centres, adapting to the needs of their children, breaking down the barriers to learning and participation in their locality, and the lessons the project draws about simple, scalable ways of ensuring community stakeholders significantly co-create and co-implement projects. Critically, we will also discuss our external endline research results. We will draw lessons learned about what has not worked so well (on community participation towards inclusive education) and where our initial assumptions were challenged, opening learning questions (for further research).

Author

• Harold Kuombola, Link Community Development Malawi