Building the capacity of community-based organizations to strengthen Ethiopian education systems

• In Event: A focus on community: Civil society and non-formal approaches to education and peacebuilding for crisis-affected learners

Proposal

In Ethiopia, education systems face the challenges of migration, conflict, and extreme weather events due to climate change, which impact their ability to provide children with safe classrooms and quality education. The digital divide is an additional barrier that affects the ability of school systems and other education stakeholders to respond to challenges. Limited access to information and communication technology (ICT), especially in rural areas, can impact the implementation of efficient and effective solutions to issues such as school closures, student dropouts, and poor learning outcomes.
Well-functioning and strong local civil society actors with digital access have greater chances to withstand crisis contexts and promote children's rights to education. There is a particular need to amplify the voices and strengthen capacity of small informal organizations that are on the front lines providing essential education services, and represent or are led by marginalized groups such as refugees and IDPs. Yet, many times such grassroots organizations struggle with effective governance, financial resources, ICT access, and personnel retention.
As part of our socio-ecological approach, Save the Children considered the importance of partnering with and strengthening informal community-based organizations (CBOs) when devising Brighter Outcomes Ethiopia (BOE) funded in partnership with Global Affairs Canada. A 4-year project that began in 2022, BOE will enhance equitable and inclusive learning outcomes for refugee, IDP and host communities, particularly girls and children with disabilities, in the Oromia (Bale) and Somali (Dollo Bay and Dollo Ado) regions of Ethiopia. 
Leveraging Save the Children's Organizational Capacity Development (OCD) model that has been developed and refined over the past 20 years in 40 countries, we aim to improve the performance of CBO partners working on gender- and disability-responsive quality primary and pre-primary education in refugee and internally displaced communities in Ethiopia. By providing OCD support to project partners, we contribute to the development of sustainable civil society with strong organisational identities. This will result in organisations with well-functioning systems, including ICT, that ensure that they can deliver quality education programs to support refugee, IDP and host children, be kept accountable, attract funding, adjust to changes in context, and better manage risks.
Capacity is the ability of individuals, institutions, and societies to perform functions, solve problems, and set and achieve objectives in a sustainable manner that leads to improvements in the lives of children and their families. Capacity strengthening is an internally owned and driven process. Our focus on organizational capacity-strengthening aims to support a CBO’s mandate and sustainability, beyond a project and partnership with Save the Children. The approach is based on a holistic analysis of CBOs’ organizational functions, and systematically addresses self-assessed capacity gaps and their ambitions for the future. The OCD process is partner-centered and builds on CBOs’ own priorities through: i) assessment, ii) prioritization, iii) planning, iv) implementation and v) evaluation processes.
Through the BOE project, we have adapted the OCD model, designed for larger, more established civil society organizations, to meet the specific needs of CBOs. This adaptation is a major programmatic innovation for BOE and Save the Children, creating tools for improving CBOs’ organizational, financial, programmatic, digital and environmental sustainability.
This presentation will explain the adapted OCD tools and their use, including the adapted organizational capacity assessment (OCA) tool, with a measurement system designed to accurately and appropriately measure existing CBO capacities, and share findings from CBOs of how they self-assessed themselves, particularly related to their ICT needs and gaps. We will also cover challenges faced in the assessment, such as addressing the pressure CBOs felt to give a good impression in their self-assessment, which resulted in inaccurate OCA results initially. Lastly, we will share lessons learned of how BOE is progressing the CBO-led organizational capacity-strengthening plans to reduce the gaps they have identified and observed effects on sustaining safe, quality and inclusive education in refugee and internally-displaced communities in Somali and Oromia regions of Ethiopia.

Author

• Deanna Del Vecchio, Save the Children