Uganda has a population of approximately 48 million people. With one of the highest fertility rates in the world, the country is home to 22 million children under the age of 15. Children face many barriers to primary education, with the country lagging behind its continental peers in key educational metrics. These barriers include local sentiment around education, quality of education, high costs of schooling and opportunity costs of education. These barriers have only been exacerbated by the school closures during COVID-19 and the Ebola outbreak.
Our partner, Building Tomorrow, has a simple mission: literacy and numeracy for all children. The organization pursues this mission by using volunteers to empower local communities to support universal access to inclusive, quality education. Its Community Education Volunteer (CEV) program provides training and support to aspiring change-makers in villages throughout rural Uganda, empowering them to become education advocates who connect youth with foundational learning opportunities. CEVs are tasked with numerous responsibilities, such as conducting learning camps to supplement school education, enrolling out of school children and sensitizing communities on the importance of education.
What was the problem?
Between 2006 and 2016, Uganda saw a rise in literacy and numeracy rates reaching between 60%-70%. However, Uganda has experienced challenges maintaining learning rates in comparison to its continental and regional counterparts. The proficiency in literacy and numeracy rates experienced steep declines and schools have seen increased dropouts since opening up after almost 2 years – the longest pandemic school closures in the world. Along with these issues, The CEV programming also saw weakening trends, which included retention and engagement of CEVs (6,101 recruited vs. 3,346 engaged) and competition with other NGOs for volunteers in communities. Thus, our scope of work focused on two main aspects – strengthening the CEV program foundation, which included improving impact reporting, and identifying opportunities for continued implementation.
What did we do?
Prior to our in-country experience, the team focused on conducting research to learn best practices from other volunteer-based organizations and potential coalition stakeholders in Uganda. This research helped us understand Uganda’s educational landscape, the barriers to education and where Building Tomorrow programming helps reduce these barriers. A major volunteer-based model we used as a basis for our project was the Ugandan Village Health Team (VHT). We also connected with other local (such as Fundi Bots) and international volunteer-based organizations (such as PASO, AMAR, and Educate Girls) to learn best practices. Finally, we also connected with existing coalitions, such as the Community Health Impact Coalition, before going in-country. Another important aspect of our pre-travel research was our weekly partner calls with members of Building Tomorrow. These calls were incredibly valuable for us to not only understand the organization better, but also lay the groundwork for our relationship with the partner once we arrived in Uganda.
When we arrived in-country, our focus was to travel around Uganda and speak to as many stakeholders as we could. The team traveled across 12 districts, visiting schools and meeting with CEVs, Fellows and government officials. The team also met several external organizations, such as Kisoboka Africa, the Catholic Diocese of Fort Portal, and the Ministry of Health who could be leveraged for improved programming.
What was the turning point?
There were two significant turning points for Team Uganda, with the first occuring while we were in-country. Though most of our initial findings and hypothesis were validated by in-depth discussions with our partners, physically visiting the schools and seeing CEVs in action was a major turning point. Through our interviews and observations, we saw how key the Fellows are to not only overseeing the CEVs, but also how their role is key long-term sustainability of Building Tomorrow programming. Upon our return, we also surveyed the Fellows to get their input on CEV recruiting, training, engagement and their role in data collection and impact reporting.
Our second turning point was upon return during one of our partner calls, when the Building Tomorrow team suggested that they would be keen to franchise the CEV model to help scale and make the program more sustainable. It was an aspect we had not considered when thinking of long-term sustainability and it helped us consider more avenues of sustainability beyond coalition building and CEV program strengthening. This also led us to speak with new potential partners to understand social franchising, such as Street Business School, which is a Ugandan NGO focused on improving financial literacy. Both turning points were key in driving us towards our recommendations to Building Tomorrow.
What was the recommendation?
The team’s recommendations were based on key insights found during our time in Uganda and research done after our return.
Recommendation #1: Building Tomorrow should first focus on strengthening the CEV foundation.
In order to reach more out of school children and to successfully enroll them in school, Building Tomorrow must scale its CEV model and strengthening operations, especially through external partnerships, are key. This would include:
Standardize written policies - We first recommended that volunteer manuals be made more user friendly by adding images and a glossary. The addition of images would engage the participants more so than does simple text. A glossary would help the reader better understand the manuals’ content. Additionally, we recommended highlighting five main responsibilities to enhance clarity, expectations, and understanding. By condensing CEV responsibilities to 5, CEVs may focus on their five most pertinent responsibilities, and will not be distracted or confused by ancillary tasks.
Strengthen recruiting mechanisms – We recommended that recruitment of CEVs should be centralized via the head of the local council (known as the LC1). Interviews and survey results showed that CEVs serve longer when mandated by their village leader to participate. Other recruitment methods may still be employed, but all recruits should be communicated to the LC1, and all should receive an LC1 directive to participate. We also recommended standardizing selection criteria across districts and introducing a self-replacement mechanism if a CEV decides to leave.
Regularize training – We recommended that CEVs should receive a certificate at the end of their pre-service training, which was highly desired not just by the volunteers but also by other stakeholders. The CEVs should only get the certificate once they complete eight days of training, be fully engaged, complete post-module review questions, and take a final oral examination. In addition to the pre-service training, CEVs should also get refresher trainings every 6 months to ensure continued engagement.
Introduce incentives for CEVs – We recommend that Building Tomorrow provide a mix of immediate and long-term incentives to improve CEV engagement. In the short-term, providing certificates from pre-service training and ID badges to volunteers would be the quickest and most cost-effective way to improve engagement. In the longer-term, Building Tomorrow could introduce professional development trainings for top performing CEVs through partnerships with organizations such as Kisoboka. A CEV Coordinator model could also be introduced, which would help volunteers get leadership opportunities and help Fellows with implementation of programming.
Improve impact reporting – We first recommended clearly defining all relevant metrics for impact reporting and circulating the definitions within the organization. Next, Building Tomorrow should increase impact measurement and reporting training for CEVs as a means to create greater consistency. Thirdly, communicating the economic impact (incremental school fees collected by the government) derived from CEVs enrolling out of school children (OOSC) would be key to gain government approval for Building Tomorrow programming, and a communication plan should be created for the same.
Recommendation #2: Building Tomorrow should explore opportunities for continued implementation and scalability
Though we suggested that Building Tomorrow first focus on strengthening the CEV model, they should explore scaling and expansion opportunities through coalition building and social franchising. We recommended that the organization should establish the basic principles of the coalition, i.e., focus on improving enrolment of out of school children, identify a core coalition group and hold an inaugural meeting to kickstart the coalition. This should be followed up with regular progress assessments and touchpoints with prospective partners. We also suggested that Building Tomorrow should continue on the momentum built with our meeting with the Ministry of Health and the Catholic Diocese of Fort Portal for government buy-in.
Since Building Tomorrow had requested us to look into a possible franchise model, we narrowed three options of scaling to explore. These include open sourcing the model for free, direct replication of the model in other regions, and social franchising, which is a mix of open-sourcing and replication. We recommended that if social franchising is pursued, Building Tomorrow should choose implementing partners wisely and be mindful of financial and quality risks. We further recommended Educate!, Teach for Uganda, and Acumen as select organizations to evaluate for franchising. In terms of potential locations, our recommendation was to identify neighboring countries with a high number of out of school children such as Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Kenya.