Transforming grass root organisations to be impactful levers of change for education to marginalised children

• In Event: Building a social movement to enable local voice for education transformation in Africa. Lessons from a Regional Education Network.

Proposal

For a significant amount of time, civil society organisations have focused their efforts on changing policy and legal frameworks by influencing bureaucratic power structures, such as the Ministry of Education or Institutes for Curriculum Development. However, a top-heavy structure, a breakdown in communication, and overlapping authority leads to lengthy policy procedures. Additionally, there is a propensity to start new policy procedures rather than highlighting how important it is to uphold prior promises in order to bring the policy process full circle.

Realising that policy is made up of a series of connected (governmental) decisions, such as laws, regulatory measures, action plans, or funding priorities—both their content and actual implementation, RELI members establishes connections and contacts with key policy makers to monitor the policy space and proactively take actions to contribute in the ongoing and emerging policy issues and discussions.

This paper outlines what civil society has found to be effective in influencing policies through constituency building and bringing about long-lasting educational improvements. Member organisations that form RELI ranges from grass root organisations operating in one district/count to National level organisations. RELI’s effort to transform organisations since its inception focused in strengthening capacity in evidence generation and communication that were provided by specialised Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning experts. Capacity development in evidence generation has led to the ability of the organisations to engage in policy dialogue at both local, national and international space. For example RELI members in Tanzania from the Equity and Inclusive thematic group were able to influence the changes in the national inclusive education strategy to redefine the categories of youth with special needs to include children in conflict with the law, children from pastoral communities and learners from marginalised communities.

Member organisations have been able to collaborate with national level advocacy organisations to champion policy change and be able to collaborate in fundraising and implement regional projects. Through the establishment of a knowledge hub Grass-root organisations have access to data that support the evidence-based policy influencing.

Examples on how organisations have used data to inform changes in practices and policies include influencing the government to register community established learning centres into a fully registered primary school in Morogoro region which were previously attached to another school. Through the RELI movement, member organisations convene every year to share policy briefs with the government and deliberate on actions that require evidence generation and collaboration. In their thematic groups member organisations identify different areas of joint project intervention and collaborate and work with development partners (funders) to effectively use scarce resource to address the needs of marginalised children.

Following the CIES theme for this year, RELI movement serves as a learning space to education actors on how the power of collaboration influences local organisations to champion change under the wings of bigger organisations guided by the values of trust, equity, and accountability.

Authors

• Gaudence Kapinga, Regional Education Learning Initiative Africa RELI

• Khadija A Shariff, Zizi Afrique Foundation