Save the Children: Transforming Health and Education in Guatemala’s Western Highlands

In August 2016, I had the privilege of visiting Save the Children’s IDEA project in Guatemala with Jonathan Cordone, the then Deputy Undersecretary of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

IDEA is a USDA project funded through the McGovern-Dole Food for Education Program. IDEA is one example of the many international humanitarian and development programs that would be a casualty of the President’s drastic proposal to cut U.S. international affairs funding by roughly one-third.

The justification for the cut was that the program lacks evidence that it is being effectively implemented to reduce food insecurity, but our Guatemala program shows that it is indeed making a difference in the lives of children.

Guatemala’s Western Highlands
In the Guatemalan Western Highlands, more than 60% of indigenous children are stunted and more than half are malnourished.  Through the IDEA project, Save the Children feeds more than 43,000 school age children per year, directly addressing food insecurity in the most impoverished region of Guatemala.

A recent independent evaluation of the IDEA program indicated that as a result of the school meals, absenteeism in program schools dropped from 20% to 5% in less than 2 years.[1]  The same evaluation found the number of children who now pay attention in class increased by 40%.  When asked why more children were paying attention in class, teachers said “They are no longer hungry.”

The McGovern-Dole Program
The McGovern-Dole program goes beyond just feeding children who otherwise would not have, in many cases, even one nutritious meal a day.  It integrates health, nutrition, and education interventions that enable children to reach their full potential.   The IDEA program has transformed barren cinderblock classrooms into engaging environments (as seen below) designed to cultivate children’s curiosity and encourage their love of learning. As a result of the USDA McGovern-Dole program, these children have learned to read in two languages: the indigenous K’iche’ language and Spanish.

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Cambridge Education: Changing girls' lives in South Sudan

Photo Credit: Ashley Hamer

A new film showcases how UK aid is transforming the lives of a generation of girls in the world’s newest nation.

In South Sudan, conflict and ingrained stigmas surrounding girls’ education are hindering long-term development. Despite insecurity, economic collapse and logistical struggles, the UK aid-funded Girls’ Education South Sudan (GESS) programme is continuing to successfully deliver its aim of educating the country’s poorest and most vulnerable girls, transforming their lives through education.

In the last three years, GESS has reached over 3500 schools, with more than 9000 grants funding classrooms, latrines, books and much more. Over 300,000 cash transfers have been paid to more than 180,000 girls, while two million people have been reached through radio programmes aimed at changing the negative socio-cultural attitudes towards educating girls.

Even during the worsening crisis, GESS has already received reports from more than 2500 schools in 2017 about how cash transfers and grants are helping them to stay open, increase their enrolment numbers and boost attendance rates despite the violent conflict.

“Inspire. Educate. Transform.”, which features girls benefiting from GESS, premiered at the UK Houses of Parliament on 29 March and shows the remarkable progress the programme has made in keeping girls in school and helping them learn. At a time when the social fabric of South Sudan is under maximum pressure, education can do more than mend the damage caused by conflict, it can provide essential building blocks for long-term development.

Cambridge Education is leading the implementation of the GESS programme with its partners BBC Media Action, Charlie Goldsmith Associates, and Winrock International, on behalf of the Department for International Development.

RTI: Improving early grade education across Kenya

In 2015, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) joined with the UK Department for International Development (DFID) to fund a program known as the Tusome Early Grade Reading Activity. Taking its name from the Kiswahili word for “let’s read,” Tusome is designed to dramatically improve primary literacy outcomes for more than 3.5 million Kenyan children in grades 1–3.

Under the leadership of the Kenyan Ministry of Education (MOE), RTI is the prime implementer of Tusome, supported by several partner organizations—WERK, Worldreader, and Dalberg- Global Development Advisors. Two major aspects of Tusome set it apart: its rigorous evidence-based approach and its national scale.
 

The project builds upon the approach of the highly successful Primary Mathematics and Reading (PRIMR) initiative, which ran from 2011–2015.

Also led by the MOE, funded by USAID and DFID and implemented by RTI, PRIMR tested early grade education interventions to assess their effectiveness and potential for national scale-up. In particular, PRIMR determined which ingredients of instructional improvement were most critical for learning, which types of information communication technology (ICT) support could make the most impact, and whether and how decisions about the language of instruction could support learning.

Under PRIMR, we collected, analyzed, and used classroom data to design and implement instructional improvements and, in turn, improve reading fluency, reading comprehension, and math abilities. We trained teachers and teacher trainers to implement these new, more effective instructional methods in low cost ways embedded in government systems.

The interventions developed and piloted through PRIMR proved successful. Rigorous randomized controlled trials showed that grade 1 and 2 students in PRIMR schools were two times more likely than those in control schools to meet the MOE’s benchmark for reading fluency and twice as likely to read with comprehension.

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