Refugee and internally displaced children and youth frequently miss substantial amounts of schooling. With each missed semester or school year there is a greater risk that they will be unable to return to formal education. Responding to the needs of these children has increasingly led governments and agencies to explore the possibility of providing Accelerated Education (AE) responses, supporting children to attain formal schooling equivalencies and providing pathways for re-entry to the formal system at appropriate grade levels. For over 15 years NRC has supported out-of-school children and youth to regain access to schooling by supporting AE programming. Such programmes are implemented across a number of countries where NRC is responding to humanitarian and early recovery situations.
While individual AE programmes have been evaluated and assessed at various points, NRC decided that it was time to undertake an organisational-wide review of this activity. A Meta-Evaluation was conducted to collate and analyse learning from across multiple evaluations. In addition, three country case studies informed the findings of the report. Connecting to NRC’s internal policy of organisational learning it was envisioned that through a meta-evaluation of AE responses spanning 15 years, evidence-based patterns would emerge. The aim was to strengthen the AE programme framework within NRC, understand positive and negative patterns that have emerged and capitalise on the lessons learned.
Three of the key findings are highlighted below:
The evaluation found that NRC’s AE programmes have made a clear contribution in providing access to education for populations who may otherwise not have such opportunity. A success of many of NRC’s AEPs has been ensuring that close to 50% of direct beneficiaries are females, often in contexts where achievement of this gender equity target is challenging. When compared to rates of female participation in formal schooling systems in many of these countries, the ability of achieving gender parity signals an even greater success.
For students who integrate into the formal education system, the hidden and actual costs of schooling can preclude them from continuing. While this has been recognised as an important challenge and concern for NRC, programmes have varied in how they respond. Some have worked extensively with the schools that students return into, or directly advocated with the Ministry of Education to ensure that costs do not become a barrier for former AEP student to succeed. Programmes such as DR Congo and Cote d’Ivoire have included the caregivers of AE beneficiaries in income generation and/or livelihood opportunities in hopes that to will better enable them to continue sending their children to school.
A real strength and success of NRC’s approach has been the active mobilisation of the wider community. Communities have played an important role in reducing issues of stigmatisation of overaged and female learners to access education, operation and oversight of programming and supporting the recruitment, selection and retention of learners and teachers.
The meta-evaluation has helped to increase understanding of the structure of AEPs (past and present) and the added value of flexible approaches. The findings will be crucial in strengthening NRC’s capacity to design, deliver and evaluate quality AE responses and has been instrumental in filling some critical gaps in evidence available to date.