AfriKids Ghana

In northern Ghana, where 7 in 10 families live in multidimensional poverty, 1 in 15 children die before their 5th birthday and more than half a million children are out of school, AfriKids is a force for change. Our award-winning projects are designed and delivered entirely by local people and are proven to achieve sustainable changes that ensure children’s rights to be healthy, safe and learn.

Our Vision is: A prosperous and thriving world without poverty, where the rights of every child are valued, protected and met by all.

Our Mission is: To ensure that every child in Ghana is afforded his/her rights as outlined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and to do this by building the capacity and resources of local people, organizations and initiatives in such a way that they will be able to continue their efforts independently and sustainably in the future.

Our core values are:       

• INTEGRITY: We do the right thing.
• UNITY: We thrive together.
• IMPACT: We make a difference.

We are a force for good, committed to excellence and accountability for everything we do. 

Key behaviors: Trustworthy, ethical, accountable.

We stand with disadvantaged children and their communities, fostering a diverse and thriving movement of stakeholders that achieve more together and are kind and respectful to everyone, always.

Key behaviors: Collaborative, compassionate, respectful.

We are passionately driven and work effectively to make the biggest difference we can for children.

Key behaviors: Determined, brave, results focused.

We are passionately driven and work effectively to make the biggest difference we can for children. 

We believe in the rights of children, everywhere and we believe these rights should be valued, protected and met by all. We exist to make this the reality for children in northern Ghana where more than half of all families live in poverty and 1 in 5 children die before their 5th birthday.

We work in 3 thematic areas of education, health and child protection with cross cutting themes in Livelihoods, gender, digitalization and environment/climate. 

Our target population are children and young adults 21 years and below with a priority given to females in Northern Ghana. Our concentration is the rural and hard-to-reach communities in Northern Ghana where we have some of the most marginalized populations (Fulbes) and where the traditions and cultures stifle equal access to education for all, especially females and minority groups.

We deliberately focus our work in the five northern regions of Ghana; where a significant majority of the country’s poorest people live, almost half of the population are children, child rights are especially at risk and over 720,000 children are out of school.

Our operations are geared towards systemic change; getting the community and state structures to work efficiently which is more sustainable. We achieve this through advocacy, partnerships and collaboration with state, community and other like-minded NGOs/CSOs.

David Pwalua joined AfriKids Ghana’s programmes leadership team in 2008 and was instrumental in transitioning a collection of community projects into a strategic programme of complementary, holistic interventions driving systemic change. Under his leadership, AfriKids’ projects have won multiple international awards and transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of children.

David was appointed Country Director for AfriKids Ghana in January 2021 and co-leads AfriKids’ International Leadership Team, involving colleagues at sister fundraising organisation, AfriKids UK. David reports to the Board of Directors of AfriKids Ghana and is the primary lead on AfriKids’ vision and strategic direction, heading up a team of more than 100 employees in Ghana.

In 2022, David marked AfriKids’ 20th anniversary by spearheading an ambitious campaign to take AfriKids’ locally led approach to scale; advocating the overlooked potential of community action to help tackle learning poverty and ensure many more children’s rights.

With a strong passion for research and evidence (he established AfriKids’ Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (MEAL) unit in Ghana), David is now focused on empirically evidencing and validating the impact of community action on increasing the number of children who complete a quality basic education. The LEAP Project can help make this possible.

Our Country Director is the Team Lead of the organization. He is a development worker with over 20 years working experience in the field. He has a first degree in educational psychology and holds a masters in Governance and Sustainable Development from the University of Cape Coast in Ghana. He has an education background; from teaching in the classroom to monitoring teaching and learning in over 200 schools. He has led in the design and implementation of several programmes here in AfriKids. He also has a research background, having worked in a research institution (Navrongo health Research Center) during the early years of his life. He has a strong passion for evidence and is responsible for the setting up of the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEAL) unit within Afrikids during his time as the Director of Programmes. He has a strong desire to test our current integrated model to improve learning outcomes which we are currently implementing in 180 schools and sees MIT Solve as a very credible platform to help us finetune this model. As such, he is very committed to this project and has devoted time to lead it. 

This is a high-level priority for AfriKids at this stage as we are on the verge of coming up with an innovation of ours that we have developed from over 20 years of working in the space of quality education for children. AfriKids has evolved over the years from a very simple organization whose source of evidence were pictures, video recordings and letters from beneficiaries to a more complex one that is more data driven and evidence-based seeing us use results frameworks and MEAL softwares like Log Alto in our programming. 

The team lead will lead a team of high professionals and Senior Managers from AfriKids who are integral to our programming and understand clearly what the model we are implementing is about as they have been part of its development and implementation and a part of our journey as an organization. 

We also have our government stakeholders in education, health and child protection on the ready to assist with this intervention as they have been key actors in the developing and implementation of this intervention. They are keen to test the model and see how it has affected the quality of education and completion rates for underserved children in rural and hard-to-reach communities. 

The stakeholders in the 60 communities we have worked in so far on this intervention have also been consulted and are ready to work with the team from MIT Solve in whatever capacity on this project. 

Unlocking potentials of communities to help improve learning outcomes and ensure quality basic education for marginalized children in northern Ghana. 

By 2050, an estimated 40% of the world's children will be African, yet currently, nearly 9 out of 10 children in Sub-Saharan Africa lack basic literacy skills by age 10. Securing education for Africa's youth is no longer just morally imperative; it's pivotal for humanity's future, enabling them to break the cycle of poverty and contribute to global challenges like climate change, inequality, and conflict resolution.

The ramifications of educational neglect are profound, leading to diminished productivity and earnings in adulthood. Without intervention, the current generation faces a staggering $21 trillion loss in lifetime earnings. Moreover, inadequate education not only curtails individual earnings but also stunts future leaders' potential to combat inequality and tackle global issues.

The demographics and challenges of non-learning children vary, yet common themes persist. Poverty, rural isolation, disability, insufficient teaching and learning resources, poor teaching pedagogies by teachers, socio-cultural practices (such as prioritising expensive funerals over educational needs) and gender disparities frequently bar children from accessing or completing basic education, with obstacles existing in both educational demand and supply.

AfriKids operates in impoverished rural Ghanaian communities where life expectancy, literacy rates, dependence on rain-fed agriculture and formal employment are notably low. 

All these challenges can be grouped broadly into three (3) areas: insufficient means, motive, and opportunity:

• Means: Families grappling with extreme poverty often find school expenses prohibitive,or prioritize children's labor over education to sustain household income.
• Motive: In communities entrenched in poverty for generations, education denial, particularly for marginalized groups like disabled children, is normalized. Child labor, early marriages, and abuse may prevail, with little recognition of education's long-term benefits.
• Opportunity: Education services in marginalized communities are typically under-resourced, with overcrowded classrooms, poor sanitation, and limited teaching resources. These inadequacies exacerbate challenges for children with disabilities and contribute to girls' dropout rates.

These challenges result in children missing critical early education, irregular attendance, and receiving subpar education, perpetuating the cycle of non-learning. Addressing these multifaceted issues necessitates holistic, locally-driven interventions, in collaboration with community stakeholders, to ensure effectiveness and sustainability.

Many hardships children endure stem from entrenched power imbalances and discriminatory systems, requiring structural transformations to safeguard their rights. AfriKids' programs aspire to empower communities by enhancing knowledge, attitudes, and opportunities, fostering enduring change for children.

By shifting power dynamics, AfriKids endeavors to mobilize communities for sustained, transformative action, thereby securing a brighter future for generations to come.

AfriKids registered as a charity in 2005 (though our activities predate this) with the sole aim of ensuring that children are safe, healthy and learn. The organization's objective in education is to bridge the gap between children in underserved communities and those in the urban ones where opportunities abound, to ensure that children in underserved rural communities have access to quality education and break out of the complex cycle of poverty becoming assets to the nation and not liabilities. Most importantly, to do this in a cost-effective manner so that it can serve the greatest number of communities. 

Addressing this requires holistic interventions involving local stakeholders. Blaming parents overlooks systemic issues like power imbalances and discriminatory practices. Therefore, for over twenty (20) years that AfriKids has been in operation, we have iterated our approach seeking to arrive at one that is simple and scalable. 

Our solution is an integrated approach that provides a common platform for the major actors in education to interact, thereby ensuring accountability on all fronts for the education of the child. It activates the demand and supply sides of education to ensure that quality education is achieved in our classrooms.  

On the demand side, we, concentrate on means and motive. Motive is increasing knowledge, attitudes and practices in communities that support every child’s right to education. We believe if we make parents understand the correlation between parental supervision at home, community involvement and support for education, communities keeping tabs on teacher performance, effectiveness of school-governing bodies and learning outcomes, they will drive the process which will lead to a sustained change in learning outcomes and completion rates for children. We use School Performance Appraisal Meetings (SPAMs) to show communities the performance in their school and the need to get involved. We also use Complementary Basic Education (CBE) which is a community-led intervention to get Out of School children (OoSC) back into school. We then use means to ensure that parents have the resources to support their children in school. In northern Ghana, there is only one rainfall pattern and so we augment their farming practices with alternative livelihoods like beekeeping and shea butter production and providing them capital to begin and or expand their businesses. 

The supply side focuses on Opportunity. Here, we build capacity of the education system to be able to meet the increase in demand for quality education from the community. We build capacities of teachers and head-teachers in school and classroom management, Universal Learning approaches, the new GES standardized curriculum, creating safe schools for children and using child-centered, activity and play-based methodologies in facilitating teaching and learning sessions. We also provide Teaching & Learning Resources to make teaching and learning effective and interactive. 

This is our integrated solution to ensuring improved learning outcomes and higher completion rates in underserved communities and we seek to scale up by documenting all our processes to ensure that many more children are able to benefit from a good quality education through this model. 

In addition to the extensive data collected by AfriKids on all programmes, independent evaluations of our relevant work to-date include:

2022. Dynamic Approach to School Improvement/DASI (2018-21). Phase 2 of ODTS (below), focused more on teacher capacity building with the DASI model comprised of eight key areas including class control and inclusive class facilitation. Evaluation carried out in 2022. 

2021. Baseline survey conducted across 60 communities ahead of our 2022-25 MMO programme in new “Demonstration Districts”. 

2019. New Beginnings 2 (2015-18). A second cycle of the New Beginnings programme, building on learnings from the phase 1 evaluation. Evaluation completed in 2019.  

2019. Opening Doors to Schools/ODTS (2015-18). Supporting children at risk of dropping out of school by improving teaching and making schools safer and more inclusive. Evaluation completed in 2019. 

2019. Foundations for Life/FFL (2016-18). Improving early years education in three districts with a focus on building the capacity of Kindergarten (KG) teachers in activity and play-based, child-centred pedagogies as well as creating model classrooms. Evaluated in 2019.  

2019. Complementary Basic Education/CBE (2013-18). AfriKids was an Implementing Partner (IP) on this nationwide intervention that sought to transition 240,000 Out of School Children (OoSC) back into formal education through Accelerated Learning Programmes. At the end of 5 years (2013-2018), AfriKids transitioned 16,000 children across 5 of the 10 regions in northern Ghana. The government-commissioned nationwide evaluation was published in 2019. 

2015. Education Bridge (2011-14). Just as the name suggests, this was an intervention that sought to bridge the gap between schools and the community (supply and demand). The evaluation was carried out in 2015.  

2014. New Beginnings 1 (2011-13). A project funded by the John Ellerman Foundation to transition children in three districts of the Upper East Region of Ghana from the worst forms of child labour into school. Evaluation completed 2014. 

AfriKids Street and Working Children's project with funding from Empower was our own version of the CBE intervention that sought to reintegrate street children back into school from 2016-2020. 

Findings from all these interventions and others over the years have shaped our current model immensely. 

A major recommendation from our evaluations has been integrating community involvement strongly in our solution. We have always involved communities; however, the recommendations have been that we empower communities to be at the front of our solution; get them to understand the true value or education which will then lead to the prioritization of education over competing family needs and also being actively involved in the school community as opposed to being isolated. 

AfriKids' main focus is the child and because of that, we operate in 3 themes; Education, Child Protection and Health and over the years, we have carried out interventions around these themes in isolation. Data from the findings suggest our interventions were strong in achieving the desired results around these themes. The gap however was that it still was not sufficient to protect the child holistically and keep the child in school. A major recommendation that run through the evaluations is that we had to look at an integrated approach where all these interventions around the three themes would be woven into one programme. This was thus a major defining moment in our programming that featured heavily in our new strategy (one million smiles) which we are currently implementing. Moving forward now, AfriKids' strategy is to use an integrated approach in any community we work in and not to work in silos around our three thematic areas. 

A thirdmajor way these evaluations shaped our programming is the fact that we had to use this integrated approach in our education interventions to get the maximum results we required. In the past, we had separate interventions that targeted communities and teachers, sometimes not even within the same time frame. Findings from the evaluation suggested that to achieve the most results, we had to use an integrated approach that will activate these demand and supply mechanisms simultaneously and get them to work together at the same time.  

Finally, scaling up has been a key recommedation from our evaluations. The feedback is often that we are reaching out to smaller numbers and should aim to reach out to higher numbers with our interventions. The fear however has been that we are not very confident in the model as there hasn't been a scientific evaluation and research that we can base huge numbers on. 

These were defining moments for us as an organization and have shaped the development of our new integrated model which we are currently piloting and hope with this grant, to be able to strengthen and scale it up to ensure more communities benefit from this model and in the long run, improve the learning outcomes and completion rates in Ghana. 

Over the past two decades, AfriKids' locally-driven initiatives have significantly improved the lives of numerous children. Through comprehensive data collection, we've evidenced the substantial positive influence of our MMO model on enhancing learning outcomes and fostering brighter futures for children. Yet, we recognize that there are untold aspects of this narrative waiting to be explored.

We aim to delve deeper. Imagine if communities, armed with information and empowerment, could ensure every child receives a quality basic education, perpetually. While many interventions focus on classroom improvements, we advocate for increased investment in communities to bolster intrinsic motivation and capacity for driving educational change.

While material inputs like school supplies and teacher training are valuable, their impact is finite. Conversely, our experience highlights that empowered communities, equipped with knowledge and opportunities, continually enhance both the supply and demand for quality education across generations.

Moreover, this approach holds promise for reaching marginalized children facing barriers beyond the classroom. Communities driven by the belief in every child's right to education can mobilize for systemic changes, such as advocating for accessible schooling for disabled children.

With over 300 years of combined experience, AfriKids' team has facilitated transformative change by empowering communities with means, motive, and opportunity. We've witnessed that sustainable change emerges not solely from external aid but from equipping communities with resources to drive their own development.

From its inception, AfriKids has championed local leadership, recognizing that communities possess unparalleled insight into their challenges. However, entrenched power dynamics have often necessitated external intervention. We aim to shift this paradigm, demonstrating that with adequate support, communities can catalyze significant change, including ensuring children's right to education.

Partnering with MIT Solve, we seek to deconstruct our MMO model to evaluate its individual components' impact. We aim to determine whether a refined model, focusing solely on empowering communities, can yield comparable improvements in learning outcomes without reliance on unsustainable material incentives.

If successful, this model could revolutionize efforts towards universal education, particularly for Africa's most marginalized children. This LEAP challenge presents a timely opportunity for us to refine our approach with MIT Solve's support, leveraging data insights to maximize impact.

Through rigorous research and analysis, we aim to identify the most impactful elements of our model and design a robust research pilot to address knowledge gaps. This independent review will not only refine our model but also provide validation crucial for securing funding to scale our initiatives.

By supporting our project, you'll endorse an innovative, community-driven solution with broad implications for improving learning outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa, setting a new standard for locally-led systemic change.

1. How has AfriKids’ MMO model impacted learning outcomes and completion of basic education among children? Specifically, which activities align with criteria for fostering community-led sustainable change?

1. Can a focused program like "Rise Up," concentrating solely on AfriKids’ interventions supporting community-led sustainable change, significantly enhance learning outcomes and address issues like exclusion due to harmful social norms?

2. If affirmative, what research inquiries should a Rise Up pilot address to validate its effectiveness, defining the concept being tested? Additionally, what data is necessary to empirically evaluate the pilot, supplementing existing knowledge? 

AfriKids hopes to achieve the following outputs at the end of the 12-week LEAPathon:

1. A MEAL plan for the organization: (It will include a framework, guidelines and training notes, setting and measuring indicators, circumstances under which RCTs will be conducted). 

2. A robust data gathering, documenting and processing regimen at AfriKids 

3. An evaluation report with: 

a. Recommendations that will be used to strengthen our integrated approach to education. 

b. Findings as to which of our approaches (means, motive, opportunity) makes the greatest impact. 

4. An open door to continue to be in touch with MIT Solve researchers after the report to continue to assist in our work. 

AfriKids will work with the expected outputs in the following way:

1. Dissemination of results: AfriKids will first and foremost disseminate the results of the LEAP project to:

a. Boad of Directors (BoD): This is to enable them to sanction all processes required for mainstreaming the feedback into our work.

b. All Senior Management Team (SMT) members within the organization and all who require taking any action will be commissioned to do so. 

c.  Monitoring Evaluation and Learning (MEAL) team. Though they will be a part of the project, a proper dissemination and debrief will be carried out and actions drawn on how we can begin incorporating the tools and feedback into our processes.

d. Stakeholders: This will include Government partners like the Ghana Education Service, other Civil Society Organizations, bilateral and donor organizations as well as target communities and beneficiaries (head teachers, teachers, children, mothers, parents, etc.) to make them understand the feedback from all that we have done together and how that is informing our current programming.   

2. Finalizing our Intergrated education model: Feedback and recommendation from the project will be used to strengthen and finalize our model

3. Introducing our model to our stakeholders (Ministry, CSO and Community stakeholders. 

4. Dedicating our resources to fundraise for the scaling and replication of this model across other parts of the country.  

Overall, AfriKids hopes to:

1. Narrow the focus of our work to the bits that bring about the most impact and desired change. Over the years, Afrikids has been tinkering and iterating on different methods and approaches to achieving higher learning outcomes and increased completion rates in rural and underserved schools. We have developed, tried and tested many approaches and this has made the organization to be seen by many as one without a definite focus. We are looking now to focus our work on the areas that bring about the most change so we can channel our resources and energy towards this course and we hope to achieve this by finalizing this model with the feedback and input that will come from the LEAP project. 

2. Scaling our work: This draws from the first. We have been doing things over the past years in smaller numbers. Our plan is to scale our work and reach out the more children in the area of education here in Ghana and other African countries. We understand that one of the surest ways to do this is by identifying a model that works. A model that is simple enough to scale and which achieves the greatest impact with little resources. The LEAP project will help us achieve this through the testing of our model. 

3. Develop a robust Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEAL) regimen that will underpin our operations here in Afrikids.