Sustainability

The GEC’s sustainability outcome was articulated as:

1. leveraging additional funds

2. ensuring mechanisms for girls to complete a cycle of education

As the GEC progressed it became evident that if it was going to be possible to learn lessons about how to make interventions sustainable, then a more robust description of sustainability was needed. This needed to be tailored to different contexts and encourage projects to plan for sustainability from the start of their implementation. The GEC developed a sustainability framework that explored indicators at the school, community and system level that would need to be present for the positive impact of projects to be sustained after project funding and intervention ceased.2 The framework sets out five levels of sustainability: Negligible (no or negative change), Latent (changes in attitude), Emerging (changes in behaviour), Becoming established (critical mass of stakeholders change behaviour) and Established (changes are institutionalised).

In general, projects in the first phase of the GEC tended to show characteristics of either latent or emerging sustainability. This is probably because there was insufficient emphasis on sustainability on the part of projects in the early stages of implementation. Furthermore, the urgency and pressures of delivering outcomes meant that in practice there was a trade-off between sustainability and achieving short term results.

Consequently, as the first phase of GEC concluded there were few examples of projects which were successful in fully establishing their approaches and demonstrating that changes made have become institutionalised and fully resourced. But there are several examples of elements that were becoming established in the sense that they had succeeded in gaining a critical mass of stakeholders who had changed their attitudes and behaviour towards girls’ education and were beginning to mobilise financial and human resources to continue project activities at either the school, community or system level.

School and community level: changing attitudes and behaviours

The foundation of sustaining any kind of successful intervention related to girls’ education is the ability to change, where needed, attitudes and behaviours of girls (and boys), schools, communities and education systems so that these foster better learning and inclusion. Behaviour change in an educational context is a process and requires going beyond, for example, establishing a curriculum for community meetings about girls’ education that is centred around key arguments such as ‘educated girls make better brides’. Behaviour change needs to actively promote ‘voice and choice’ for girls and women, and have high ambition for and expectations of what girls can achieve. The STAGES project in Afghanistan found that representation was not enough. As a result, STAGES is now re-engaging with men and women involved in shuras to understand how the benefits of women’s involvement can be maximised.

Representation is not enough: STAGES, Afghanistan

Although there are a substantial number of women participating in school shuras (school committees), including in all-female shuras, findings suggest that women are not necessarily being empowered to make key decisions to support the maintenance and continuity of classes. This is partly due to their continuing lack of mobility and wider community perceptions that certain types of tasks (such as raising funds, implementing infrastructure, and mobilising government support) are better done by men.

It is not surprising therefore that not all projects that succeeded in improving learning also managed to establish new attitudes and practices that would sustain that learning after the project concluded. However, projects that have begun to show results in this area all developed a deep understanding of the context of their work and acknowledged that differing contexts, even within a small geographical area, require differing, adapted approaches. These successful projects worked to secure commitments from girls, communities and schools by engaging them as agents of change within their own communities. Link Community Development, working in Ethiopia, involved girls in project design from the beginning.

Girls as agents of change: Link Community Development, Ethiopia

The project is built on an understanding of girls’ needs and suggestions girls made to change their situation. For example, the supply of sanitary pads, decreasing of domestic workload, and tutorial classes were suggested by girls in focus group discussions before the project started. This approach was extremely effective because the participants had already bought into the interventions.

Camfed International, in their Tanzania and Zimbabwe, not only involved girls before the project to support more sustainable activities, they also supported girls to form a new group of female leaders prepared to support girls in the future to gain an education and become empowered young women.

Learner Guides: Camfed International, Tanzania and Zimbabwe

Camfed International introduced a new group of activists – their Learner Guides. Learner Guides are young women who have previously been supported by Camfed to progress successfully through school and are now trained to support the welfare and learning of marginalised children in their communities. A micro-loan scheme has enabled Camfed to offer interest-free loans to this network of women, with their volunteering valued as ‘social interest’. There is potential for a major scale-up of this model, which is highly sustainable.

A number of projects which succeeded in changing attitudes and, therefore, increasing enrolment and attendance in school put this down to successful media campaigns. In Sierra Leone, Plan International mounted a national radio campaign aimed at getting girls to go back to school and in Afghanistan more localised campaigns were run. Education Development Trust in Kenya worked to change attitudes to girls’ learning.

Community conversations: Education Development Trust, Kenya Education Development Trust used Community Conversations to ensure that communities support the education of girls. The project aimed to change the attitudes, perceptions and knowledge of communities about the education of girls. From baseline to endline there is evidence of progressive change. For example, pastoralist communities that are strongly attached to livestock were beginning to barter them for girls’ education, more community leaders agreed that it is important to send girls to school and there were reported delays in ‘marrying off girls’. This is gradual change but demonstrates a breakthrough in community perceptions about girls’ education.

School management and governance: Successful projects included an element of working with specific groups of parents (women’s groups or mothers’ groups, as well as mixed parents’ groups) to influence attitudes towards more sustained support for girls’ education or introduce new ways to be inclusive and effective.

School mothers: Red Een Kind, South Sudan

The work of ‘school mothers’ (nominated community members) helped to reduce the barrier of inadequate support and follow up for girls. School mothers reduced the gap caused by absence of female teachers in school by: conducting roll calls in schools (three times a week); conducting weekly meetings to address emerging challenges to girls’ attendance; engaging parents to ensure that girls get back to school; monthly reports on emerging issues for follow up; and mentoring girls on personal hygiene. Consequently, girls were able to get to school early, maintain personal hygiene and restart school for those who had dropped out. The aforementioned benefits consequently increased enrolment and retention of girls in school.

The example below shows how International Rescue Committee in DRC reinvigorated school assemblies and parents’ committees.

School general assembly and parents’ committees: International Rescue Committee, DRC International Rescue Committee reinvigorated the School General Assembly and Parents’ Committees (COPAS). COPAS members’ capacities were strengthened throughout the implementation of the project to allow them to be better involved in school management during and after the project. They now participate effectively and will continue even after the project to participate in the determination of schools’ needs and management as many of the members testified during monitoring visits undertaken by project staffs. COPAS have been able to lead general assemblies to identify the needs of the school and acquired relevant skills that will be useful to them in their long-term involvement.

Working at system level

Working with girls, their communities and their schools from the beginning of the project with the aim of sustaining supportive activities needs to be complemented by work at system level if interventions to encourage and improve girls’ education are to be sustainable. This entails working to understand the political economy of support to education and girls’ empowerment, and working to address the appropriate players at the right time to influence this.

Working with government: If governments and local authorities are to be expected to sustain project approaches and, therefore, the gains achieved, they need to be able to replicate these approaches using their own systems and resources. A number of projects, for example, Education Development Trust and International Rescue Committee, worked through government systems to introduce essential elements such as new teaching approaches, instead of setting up their own parallel systems.

Working with government: Education Development Trust, Kenya and International Rescue Committee, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) Education Development Trust worked with the Teachers’ Service Commission at district and subdistrict level, training them in effective methodologies from the outset, rather than relying on project employees to deliver training at the school level, and so left a network of trained and experienced teacher trainers.

International Rescue Committee in DRC developed a strategic partnership with the Ministère de l’enseignement primaire, secondaire et professionnel in the development of in-service teacher training system and policy. By working within the existing model of teachers’ in-service professional development at the school level, VAS-Y Fille!’s activities have strengthened existing systems, which will continue well beyond the life of the project.

Influencing Policy: Some of the successful projects succeeded in proving the efficacy of a set of interventions on a small scale and then working to influence policy as a means of scaling up those interventions. Working closely with governments to influence policy was an essential element of Leonard Cheshire’s project in Kenya.

Working with government to influence policy: Leonard Cheshire, Kenya

Leonard Cheshire is leading on promoting inclusive education and has been instrumental in influencing the government to introduce three county bills critical to inclusive education (Bursary Bill, Disability Act and Early Childhood Education Bill). They have directly contributed to the integration of disability indicators into the government’s education monitoring system for decision making and resource allocation. They have contributed to the content and the orientation of training for new teachers, ensuring that an inclusive education component is included. At the national level, Leonard Cheshire has influenced and supported the development of the content of the National Sector Policy on Learners with Disability.

They have also contributed to the broadening of the mandate and resources of a Special Needs Directorate within the Ministry of Education. Leonard Cheshire attributes the success of their advocacy and sustainability approach to genuine and intentional engagement right from the start of the project, and to the clear aims it set out to achieve. The organisation describes ‘pushing on a half-open door’ and notes that its voice is one among several calling for change in this area, and actively seeks collaboration for maximum effectiveness.

However, even working closely with governments and local authorities, convincing them of the efficacy of a new approach and training their employees to use the approach is sometimes still not enough to ensure sustainability. As Link Community Development put it:

“Some of the activities will be sustained by the educational authorities, because the project was embedded in the policy and structures of the Ministry of Education.This also allowed for scaling up where appropriate. However, the largest barrier in sustainable implementation of the project activities is limited funding to support future implementation and follow-up training”. Endline report, Link Community Development

In Afghanistan, all of the GEC projects found that although the government was initially optimistic that they could take over project interventions this changed midway through the project, with the government informing projects that despite ‘a clear commitment of the Ministry of Education (MoE) to take over classes, and a clear handover process developed with the MoE’, the MoE would not be taking over the community-based education (CBE) classes in the foreseeable future.This was because the unit costs for the type of interventions that the projects were proposing were still too high for the government to take on. However, by working together as a group of GEC projects, supported by DFID advisers and the local donor group, projects in Afghanistan succeeded in influencing government policy around CBEs which sets out a framework and process for the institutionalisation of CBE in the long term.They also gained support from USAID which is contributing to funding of the next phase of GEC in Afghanistan. It is still to be seen whether projects can tailor their approach so that it can eventually come within the means of the Afghan government to take over.

Making girls’ education interventions sustainable means making them affordable, both for the girls and their families, and also for the government which ultimately has to provide the service. This often means working at levels which can influence fiscal space, budget allocation and budget utilisation. Although many of the GEC projects worked closely with government authorities, working at this level was only possible where there was close collaboration with DFID or other in-country donors who had possibilities to influence at that level.

© STAGES