AGENCI

The specific interventions supported by WUSC in South Sudan, and by AKFC in Uganda and Syria, will be based on the needs, priorities, and realities of each context. Activities include:

Responding to specific barriers and educational needs identified by adolescent girls, female youth, community members, and educational stakeholders, determined through gender analyses conducted in the three countries.

Addressing the root causes of inequality by challenging and transforming structural barriers and entrenched social norms, attitudes, and power relations that impact girls’ ability to access and benefit from education.

Implementing a combination of both innovative and tested interventions including media campaigns, community outreach, girls’ and boys’ clubs, flexible response funds, and mentorship programs.

Working with education stakeholders to provide training and support, ensuring that teachers and educational leaders have the skills, resources, data, and information they need to provide girls with safe, quality, gender-responsive, and inclusive learning environments

Highlights from Y3 Annual Report:

Enhancing empowerment of adolescent girls and female youth pursuing educational pathways in crisis affected areas of South Sudan, Uganda, and Syria.

Findings from annual outcome monitoring assessments in Uganda and Syria indicate that progress has been made towards the ultimate outcome. Outcome monitoring was not conducted in South Sudan as more time was needed to see the results of the redesigned components based on project adaptations made in Year 2. Overall, the project is on track to achieve the expected ultimate outcome.

Reducing social, cultural and economic barriers to accessing safe, secure, gender equitable and quality upper-primary, secondary and skills-based education by adolescent girls and female youth.

There has been a positive shift in stakeholders’ support for AGFYs’ education in Uganda and Syria compared to the Rapid Gender Analysis (RGA) and baseline study. In Uganda, community leaders reported to feel increasingly knowledgeable about the support that they can provide to girls’ education and some are offering AGFY counselling and guidance. It is likely that AGENCI activities such as community outreach sessions, multimedia campaigns and engagement of formal and non formal teachers contributed to these results. In Syria, communities are increasingly supporting AGFYs’ education, with interest in the project’s NFE centres often surpassing the capacity thresholds. While attendance rates remain slightly below the project target (by 4%), AGENCI has made significant progress and is on track to achieve the project target. Similarly, despite continued and intensified barriers to AGFYs’ access to education, through the continued rollout of innovative communications, outreach, mentorship, and other activities and approaches the project will strive to mitigate challenges and increase overall access. The AGENCI project in South Sudan has increased access to resources for 119 girls through the scholarship program. As a result of this intervention, Maridi Girls Boarding Secondary School, which should have closed in 2021 after another organisation concluded their support, is now functional and providing education services to 147 adolescent girls and female youth. The national government has now assumed responsibility for the school and invested in the school’s infrastructure and available resources to learners.

Improving equitable and coordinated provision of quality, gender responsive, innovative and inclusive formal and non-formal educational opportunities.

Progress has been made towards this outcome in all three project countries. FGDs with teachers in Uganda revealed that AGFY learners are progressing to different learning levels, with the majority attaining average proficiency in the academic subjects taught. Data from project-supported NFE centers in Syria showed high proficiency levels of adolescent girls and female youth in mathematics, reading, and leadership. The AGENCI project in South Sudan did not collect data to measure progress against the indicators. However, the project focused its efforts on enhancing the provision of continuous professional development support for teachers, with an emphasis on providing additional and more targeted support on gender-responsive pedagogy (GRP) to improve teachers’ capacity to deliver and support safe, quality, gender-responsive, and inclusive education.

Highlights from Y1:

A major focus of year one has been on developing the curriculums and methodology for the life skills curriculums, which is necessary for building up the confidence and providing necessary skills to adolescent girls and female youth to take charge of their own lives. Each country has partially or fully drafted a version of the life skills curriculum to meet their contextual needs and has identified schools/ non-formal education spaces, facilitators and a roll out methodology for this to take place in year 2. Contingency planning, such as outdoor sessions have also been factored in in case Covid 19 risks continue.

Furthermore, safety and protection of adolescent girls and female youth remained a big priority for the AGENCI project team. Uganda successfully rolled out training on psychological support for girls to teachers and caregivers, whereas in South Sudan, a mechanism for enlisting community protection groups to assist girls during these difficult times was established and will be rolled out in year 2. The aim of these activities is to ensure that girls have the resources to combat the difficult situations that they have had to face in the past year, and connect them to referral pathways for continued support that is beyond the scope of the AGENCI project. In Syria, the curriculum was finalised during the reporting period and will be rolled out in Year 2. The project has focused on devising, revising and contextualizing teacher training and facilitator training modules and training roll out methodology and plans. In South Sudan, Uganda and Syria teacher training modules have been under development. In South Sudan, this will be the first formal secondary education teacher training module developed and handed over to MoGEI. In Uganda this has included the introduction of Values Based Education modules at the request of UN agencies and other stakeholders in the region. Whereas in Syria, this has included a reassessment tool that has been developed to assess skills and qualifications of teachers, which will help them customize the training according to their needs.

Across the three countries the teacher training approach focuses on building basic classroom management, gender responsive and inclusive pedagogical approaches, including the provision of psychosocial support. Through these training modules and approaches, the capacity of teachers will be improved and make school and non-formal education systems more gender responsive for adolescent girls and female youth.