Let Girls Learn: Supporting Marginalized Girls through Education
Updated: Nov 15, 2018
Mozambique, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Somalia, Zimbabwe
Increasing gender equality is not just a goal of Forcier’s research, but a core foundation of our research design. We view gender as an essential component of assessments - not only as an opportunity to elicit positive change in programming, but also to contribute to the broader base of gender equity and equalequal opportunity for women and men in the research we conduct.
The international community has seen a dramatic shift in funding for girls, inspiring a wave of programs focused on creating a space for the female voice within the global community, primarily through increased access to education. One of the largest sources of funding is the UK government-funded Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC). The GEC helps up to a million of the world’s poorest girls improve their lives through education. Funded activities focus on improving literacy, numeracy, and skills relevant for life and work, as well as tackling harmful social and gender norms that contribute to girls being out of school. A majority of Forcier’s gender work has centered on increasing education opportunities for girls in Africa. Forcier has conducted over ten different evaluations for the Girls Education Challenge, in Mozambique, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Zimbabwe. In collaboration with partners such as CARE, Plan International, and The National Foundation for Educational Research, we have conducted project evaluations to ensure that the changes in quality of education experienced by girls is not only recorded and quantified but also analyzed and summarized to improve and tailor future programming.
A Girl Focused Approach
A robust research approach is essential when looking at the root causes of issues preventing girls from attaining higher learning outcomes, attendance and completion rates. In every GEC assessment to date, Forcier designs a research approach that includes a mix of both quantitative and qualitative data through the use of household surveys with parents of girls; school surveys to measure enrollment, attendance, retention, and exam pass rates - disaggregated by grade level, gender, and disability status; learning assessments to measure outcomes related to numeracy and literacy; and monitoring to track marginalized girls benefiting from targeted support.
With increased programming comes a need for increased monitoring and evaluation. Monitoring and evaluation is the much-needed check on international programming which can provide: baseline data sets on targeted girls to measure change, mid-term evaluations of programs so as to measure the effectiveness of programming, and endline evaluations to measure overall efficiency, effectiveness, and change in selected girls. Forcier sees the need for gender-disaggregated data as one of the keys to increasing opportunities for women and girls around the globe and to better understand the complex dynamics behind barriers that girls face in attending school.
Forcier Consulting Group