Girls’ Access to Education (GATE)

The GATE project supported 11,012 girls and was implemented by Plan International UK in Sierra Leone.

Sierra Leone and its education system has faced a multitude of challenges in recent decades, including recovery from conflict, natural disasters and Ebola. As a result, schools in rural and remote areas faced severe structural challenges in infrastructure, teacher availability, and resource accessibility, which affect learning outcomes. Girls from rural communities and those living in poverty are particularly at a higher risk of dropping out of school. These girls already struggle to access nearby schools and staying home increases the risk of early/forced marriage and early pregnancy. At the school level, gender-based violence is evident, with violence occurring both on the way to school and in school – by perpetrators including male teachers, peers, and older students.

GATE supported Sierra Leone’s most marginalised, adolescent girls. The project enabled greater access to school amongst this group, improved their learning results and supported their transition to further education and employment. It did this through study groups, training and support of female learning assistants, and training student teachers. It worked with community-based rehabilitation volunteers to support children with disabilities. Bursaries and economic initiatives activities (e.g. village savings and loans associations and livelihoods grants) helped address the costs of education and were used to support the sustainability of activities.

Main activities

• Establishing and resourcing numeracy and literacy study groups for primary school and junior school students.
• Supporting young women to become teachers through a distance learning programme.
• Providing capacity building and Continuous Professional Development for teachers, Head Teachers and School Management Committees/Board of Governors.
• Training and supporting 141 Community-based Rehabilitation Volunteers to support disabled children in the community.
• Supporting 200 village savings and loans associations to help families with income generation for the benefit of educating their children and trained 125 Village Agents to support VSLA sustainability and expansion.
• Undertaking community awareness-raising for children, teachers and traditional leaders to promote girls’ education and inclusive education.

The project in numbers

Lessons learned

Increasing female presence in schools has led to more equitable school communities. The Student Teachers and newly qualified teachers have played a critical role in improving the lives of the learners within the project. Through their presence as educators within the school setting, the young women have become strong role models for girls.

VSLAs build resilience against financial shocks and deepened their impact by working through existing community structures. VSLAs were designed to help members find sustainable sources of income by teaching saving, budgeting, and through the introduction of business and financial education sessions. They have proven to be an effective instrument for cushioning against financial crisis, even during COVID-19. It empowered communities to come together and manage their financial constraints and collectively address their communities’ financial development.

Score-carding brought out the voices of the marginalised, especially girls and women. The score-carding activity proved effective at raising issues facing girls and boys at the school level. The initial hesitance of girls to voice their opinions was mitigated by segmenting the feedback groups into boys and girls and installing anonymous suggestion boxes in schools. This resulted in their active participation and concrete suggestions that yielded improvements in school functioning, such as reducing corporal punishments, building toilet facilities in close proximity to schools to ensure girls’ safety, and building school facilities like water wells and fences.

Ensuring learners safety was key to bringing them back to school. Strong community networks and relationships ensured the project kept in touch with children during school closures and their assurances of school safety were successful in engaging families in the return to school. Parents noted GATE-GEC’s work in making schools safer and more inclusive through score-carding action plans and ensuring compliance of COVID-19 measures were critical in their decision to send their children back to school.

Plan International: https://plan-international.org/