Excelling Against the Odds

The Excelling Against the Odds project supported 16,481 girls and was implemented by Child Hope UK in Ethiopia.

The project supported marginalised girls and communities that lived in poverty and lacked access to quality education. In Ethiopia, there is worse enrolment and literacy rates in rural areas than urban areas. Schools are inaccessible to many learners due to distance. Schools are often under-resourced and many students struggle in higher grades when the medium of instruction switches to English. The cost of schooling is a barrier for poor families and attitudes are often biased against girls’ education. Families facing economic burdens are more likely to pressure girls into early marriage. Other marginalisation factors include heavy domestic burdens, violence in the home, risky migration and disability.

The project enabled 16,480 marginalised girls aged between seven and 18 in remote areas of Ethiopia to learn in school and successfully transition from primary to secondary education, vocational training, university or employment. This was done by ensuring learning spaces were safe and stimulating, classrooms were well-resourced, and teachers were equipped with effective teaching approaches. The project also worked with community members, including boys, to challenge and change negative social norms, and to ensure support for girls’ education.

Main activities

• Setting up reading corners and homework tutorial clubs to support girls that needed extra help
• Maintaining robust safeguarding reporting mechanisms in 74 schools.
• Providing teachers with training and mentoring to develop more effective teaching approaches tailored to girls’ specific needs.
• Establishing Communities of Practice to promote collaborative and reflective working to support teacher professional development.
• Creating Girls’ Clubs which challenged gender norms and supported girls to be more confident, empowering them by offering life skills training and raising their aspirations.
• Influencing broader social change around issues of gender in Ethiopian society through instigating a ‘Girls’ Movement’. This movement was led by young female leaders who lead local campaigns promoting the value of girls’ education.
• Developing employability skills for girls by providing an entrepreneurship and employability skills development service.

The project in numbers

Lessons learned

Teacher-led Communities of Practice (CoPs) lead to a culture of change for improvement. One of the most successful elements of the project was the introduction of the CoPs to ensure teachers received ongoing support and mentoring. Teachers liked that the classroom observations were not ‘top-down’ management tools, but a means of working with other teachers to find solutions to problems.

Teacher training is effective when it is embedded in everyday activities. Teachers' professional development needs to relate to teachers’ everyday teaching and on-going problems they encounter in their classroom. Central to TPD approach was the reflective conversations with teachers on what else they needed, which identified the need for additional training and ongoing support and mentoring.

Girl-led community dialogue helps with understanding and challenging cultural norms. When girls’ life skills and confidence are built, they can challenge beliefs around inequitable gender norms, develop new shared beliefs among themselves, the school and the wider community, and become agents of change.

Including boys in girls’ education programming supports transformation change. Good Brothers’ Clubs were revived in schools and as a result, boys understood the social norms and barriers that affect girls accessing and staying in education and life in general. Boys started to take household chores from the girls to study, and girls reported greater respect and understanding of girls’ educational journeys.

ChildHope UK: https://www.childhope.org.uk/