Education Empowerment for Rural and Urban slums Initiative

Mission statement

Our mission is to eradicate poverty in Kenya through provision of high-quality education to underprivileged communities. 

Vision Statement

We envision communities where all children have equal access to quality education irrespective of social and economic status.

Objectives

Our main/general objective is to provide opportunities for access to quality education by the disadvantaged and vulnerable children in urban slums and rural communities in Africa.

Specific objectives include:

• To make timely, innovative and evidence-based interventions that enable children that lag behind to catch up, keep pace and learn.
• To develop and cultivate early acquisition of foundational literacy and numeracy skills crucial for lifelong learning and innovation.
• To mobilize resources and provide infrastructural, technical and financial support necessary for quality education.

The Team Lead, who is also the founder and Chief Executive Officer, is the topmost leader in the organization and is responsible for overseeing executive leadership, formulating strategy and providing strategic direction of the organization. He is also responsible for managing the organizational structure, guiding implementation of the organization’s programmes, initiating and fostering collaborations and working partnerships with like-minded organizations and creating a communication link with the board.

He also boosts success of the team by recruiting, molding and retaining exceptional employees, managers and volunteers. 

We are confident that the Team Lead and other supporting members are well positioned to support the LEAP project.

The Team Lead has demonstrated, over time, his ability to commit to a worthy cause and accomplish it. For instance, he has been engaged in multiple initiatives that have supported more that 3,000 learners from underserved communities to improve learning outcomes in two years. These initiatives include community-wide and school-wide interventions meant to accelerate the acquisition of foundational skills in literacy and numeracy especially to those learners left behind. He has also established and maintained partnerships with individuals and organization that have supported the successful implementation of these initiatives. In addition, he has been involved in research into social entrepreneurship in education. He will therefore leverage these experiences to effectively work with the expert fellows during the LEAP project period to enhance the quality of the output.

While we have other activities that need our attention, we consider the LEAP project to be important to us individually, to our organization’s mission specifically and to the community we serve generally. So, we have projected our time requirements during the LEAP project period and factored this in our plans in case we get this opportunity to participate as project hosts. 

Our Team Lead will commit the required time for the 12-week period and he will also be available for any other subsequent periods necessary for this idea to be actualized.

Keeping pace program.

Many children in Sub-Saharan Africa are schooling but not learning. According to a report by the World Bank and UNESCO Institute of Statistics, 53 percent of children in low- and middle-income countries cannot read and understand a simple story by the end of primary school. In poor countries, the level is as high as 80 percent. A report by Uwezo Kenya Learning assessment shows that only 2 in 5 grade 4 learners at least meet expectations in reading a grade 3 appropriate English text. The odds for children from wealthy households to have better learning outcomes are more than twice those for children from poor households. 

Most of these children are from poor households. Often, children who miss key concepts in the early grades never have a chance to catch up, no matter how many years they spend in school. This affects further learning and subsequently inhibits their life chances hence perpetuating the endemic poverty cycle in families.

Even though the government makes interventions such as provision of inputs like furniture and books, the problem persists. This is particularly because of classes having learners with a variety of learning needs. In addition,  large class-sizes force teachers to teach at the top of their classes, moving with the pace of the fastest learners thus leaving many learners behind. There is also lack of tracking and monitoring of performance of learners due to inadequate or insufficient data capturing systems.

The keeping pace programme targets the root of the learning crisis by transforming the structures that lead to it. The approach works by dividing children into groups based on learning needs rather than age or grade; dedicating time to basic skills rather than focusing solely on the curriculum. The instruction is targeted and aligned with learning needs. It also provides for regular assessment of student's performance to inform progression to a higher level or offer additional responsive learning support. In summary the solution has five major steps:

• Implementation teams’ capacity building Since this program is unique in its delivery, the facilitators/ teachers are first of all trained on the approach. The training is meant to ensure that the teachers fully understand the objectives of the approach and acquire the necessary knowledge for efficient delivery.

• Assessment The learners are tested on the basic literacy and numeracy skills using simple tools. This is done to determine the competency level of the child. The assessment data is used to determine the grouping.

• Grouping Here the learners are grouped based on the assessment data irrespective of their grade or age. The groups are homogeneous ie. Every group has learners with similar learning needs.

• Classroom Activities Each group is assigned a facilitator/teacher who creates activities and materials suited to children’s needs, rather than adhering to a linear curriculum. Classes are fun and fast-paced, and children strengthen a number of skills simultaneously.

• Monitoring There is continuous monitoring of the teaching and learning process to assess the progression of learners.

One important element of this solution is to have dedicated time aside from the normal school hours for it to realize the full benefits. This also prevents teachers from defaulting back to their normal routine of teaching thus rendering the program ineffective.

Since the approach relies heavily on the teacher’s competence and motivation, teachers are thoroughly trained on the approach and provided with simple tools for classroom level measurement prior to implementation.

To address the data collection challenge, the program includes a tool that captures diagnostic and formative assessments data from multiple schools during implementation. The system makes this data available to all the relevant stakeholders in the entire education ecosystem based on their needs. Quality classroom assessment data can help teachers understand progress against curricular standards and provide children responsive and on-going learning support. At a national or regional level, baseline measures of learning can help policymakers understand the scale of the learning challenge, trends in learning over time, and inequalities in student learning, which can help them make informed decisions on where and how to mobilize resources to reverse learning poverty and drop-out among those most vulnerable.

This technology component will also ensure effective use of the limited implementation time by reducing the teacher’s workload and providing accurate data to inform further actions by the teacher and national and regional education officials.

Based on the nature of the problem that we are trying to solve, we have employed foundational, research, formative research as well as summative research.

We started of with read available literature on the learning crisis brought about by lack of the foundational literacy and numeracy skills. This literature review included research papers, websites, journals etc. The information from these sources motivated us to want to get more insights into the issue.

We then decided to get more evidence through implementation. We conducted the first intervention within the community where we reached more than 150 children from different schools, age and grades. We recorded slight improvements in reading and Math, even though we had not been formally trained on the approach. We then sought training from the TaRL team and implemented the program in four schools for three months reaching 1,446 learners in the process. The results were encouraging even though they were not without challenges.

Some of the challenges identified was the limited implementation time, lack of accurate, timely assessment data, teachers being overstretched by extra work, inadequate teacher training etc.

From the research we conducted through literature review and implementation, we realized that the solution has a great potential to support learners left behind gain the foundational skills in a short time. With further evidence and adjustments to the solution, we believe that this solution will help improve the learning outcomes of millions of children that are currently facing this learning challenges.

The research indicated that our solution would need an additional tool that would help reduce the facilitators' workload and make the implementation time more efficient.

To this end, moving forward we saw it important to gather as much evidence as possible to ground our decision-making and tailor our solution to best support learners gain these skills. We therefore have proposed to incorporate technology into our program specification to help in data capturing recording and analysis. We expect the LEAP Project to help develop a concrete framework to gather enough evidence for the efficacy of this component.

According to new data published in “The State of Global Learning Poverty: 2022 Update” by World Bank show that in 2019 learning poverty—the share of children unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10— was at 57 percent, higher than previously thought. After lengthy school closures and unequal access to remote and in-person instruction, learning poverty has increased by a third in low- and middle-income countries, with an estimated 70% of 10-year-olds unable to understand a simple written text. With this in mind, inequality in learning is growing. The COVID 19-instigated school closures have deepened existing disparities in education, with learning losses worse for the most vulnerable children. In Kenya, 75% of lower primary children cannot read a simple text. 

Having already tested this solution in four schools reaching over 1,400 learners in three months, I believe this is the right time to engage in the LEAP Project. During this period, we understood how this solution has the capacity to accelerate learning for those children left behind while still maintaining their progression to subsequent grades. We also gathered valuable feedback from learners, teachers, education officials as well as parents. This feedback informed our need to make necessary contextual adjustments to our solution and strengthen our evidence base. The LEAP Project offers the best avenue for us to sharpen our ideas, co-develop better ideas, test them and design a solution that will reverse the trend of the learning loss among the most vulnerable children and reduce inequality. 

• We expect the LEAP project to help us in answering these two research questions:

1. How does diagnostic and formative assessment data affect learning outcomes?

2. How does the number of learners per facilitator determine overall efficiency of the program?

3. How does the Keeping Pace program lead to additional benefits aside from literacy and numeracy skills.

1. Efficient use of instruction time

One of the challenges we encountered during our three month implementation was the limited implementation time in schools. This was due to the compressed curriculum and also the additional work that the teachers are required to do apart from actual teaching. Teachers are required to continuously assess the learners after an average of two weeks, record their findings and analyze before proceeding with teaching. This leaves little time for the most important task of teaching. We would like the LEAP Project to help us with a concrete framework that will help us identify some of the areas we can take advantage of to reduce the amount of work done by the teachers and to allow them to spend more time on teaching.

2. Motivation by teachers 

We also found out that teachers are demotivated mostly by the extra work that the program demands of them which includes teaching, assessments, recording and analysis. Since teachers are a major factor in the success of this program, we would like the LEAP Project to help develop guidelines and data collection methods that will help us unlock some ideas that could improve the teacher’s motivation. 

Specifically, we believe the use of technology to facilitate accurate data capturing, measurement and monitoring will increase teachers' motivation hence better results from implementation. We would therefore like the LEAP Project to help provide the basis for strengthening this assumption based on concrete evidence.

3. Template to measure learning outcomes

It has been widely assumed that mastery of foundational literacy and numeracy skills solidifies learning and serves as a proxy for foundational learning in other subjects thus improving overall learning outcomes. We would like the LEAP Project to help us develop a template that measures the learning outcomes and other additional benefits linked to the foundational literacy and numeracy skills to strengthen this evidence.

At the same time, since our intervention also revealed conflicting facts about the overall improvement in acquisition of foundational literacy and numeracy skills based on the number of learners handled by one facilitator, we would like the LEAP Project to help provide a reliable basis for this which will later help us determine the optimum number of learners per a facilitator for the best results.

4. School attendance

Since school attendance is integral to learning. That said, children are likely to attend class consistently if they find it fun and if they understand what is being taught. The Keeping Pace program is fun-filled and has shown marked improvements in learning. We would like the LEAP Project to help us develop ideas, tools and frameworks that will help determine the link between class/ school attendance and the Keeping Pace program interventions.

Following the conclusion of the LEAP Project, we will immediately review and analyze the report for immediate action.

First, we will develop a framework of action based on the recommendations from the Fellows. Since we will have been involved in the entire process throughout, it will be easier to put the recommendations into actionable steps.

Next, we will incorporate the recommendations regarding data collection, analysis and reporting in all the activities before, during and after implementation of the programs.

We will then provide specific indicators for each output to guide us in the implementation of the project's recommendations during our operations.

Lastly, we will be flexible and make necessary adjustments based on the contextual framings while maintaining the overall structure of the recommendations. This will help in ensuring that the solution achieves its goal of helping learners with different needs get the necessary support based on their needs.

Short Term outcomes for EERUI

As an organization, our short-term outcomes will include:

1. Quality decision making- We will use the strong evidence base created by the LEAP Project to improve the quality of decision making which will directly impact the delivery of our interventions.

2. Research knowledge; The 12-week LEAP Project sprint will greatly enhance our research capacity in terms of data collection research methods and analysis. This is an integral part for our organization in terms of grounding our programs on evidence.

Long term outcomes for the EERUI

In the long term, EERUI will realize the following outcome:

1. Program efficiency; Based on the LEAP Project deliverable during the 12-week sprint, we will have a strong body of evidence that will enhance the Keeping pace program beyond the acquisition of foundational numeracy and literacy skills. We expect to incorporate secondary outcomes of the program such as socio-emotional skills, 21st century skills etc. These additional benefits will improve the efficiency of the program and increase stakeholder-buy-in among other related benefits.

Short Term outcomes for Keeping Pace

1.  Literacy and numeracy skills- the program will help learners develop literacy and numeracy skills that solidify their learning and help them engage in lifelong learning activities.

2.  Improved learner confidence: The program will ensure that the learners are confident and motivated to proceed with learning.

3. Learning outcomes: Acquisition of these foundational skills will help learners be able to effectively learn other subjects hence boosting their learning outcomes overall.

Long term outcomes for Keeping Pace

1. Dropout rates: The long-term outcome of this program is to reduce the dropout rates among learners who mainly drop out due to frustrations caused by lack of learning.

2. Reduced poverty levels: Since most learners who have learning difficulties are poor, the program will ensure that, in the long run, these learners proceed with their education and improve their life chances thus reducing poverty among their families.