More Schooling

Thanks for making it this far through the site…..below is a detailed proposal from More Schooling - it was written by the students in the Association in tandem with an Education consultant and the help of some local NGO’s.

PROGRAMME SUPPORTING CHILDREN AT RISK FROM SCHOOL DROP-OUT

IN PARAKOU, BENIN

INTRODUCTION

Net enrolment rates in primary school are still low (77.05 per cent in 2005), which is an indication of generally low enrolment rates overall in the education system, especially in the Northern Region (61.21 per cent).[1] APEED (the NGO More Schooling) aims to partner the government and other agencies working in education to get more children into school and to keep them there, with particular emphasis, in the case of APEED, on reducing secondary school drop-out. In the northern eastern province of Alibori-Borgou the primary enrolment net rate was the lowest in the country in 2005, at only 56,57 per cent, meaning that nearly 45 per cent of primary age children were out of school, while enrolments in Mono-Couffo Province were, for example, 100 per cent.

One of the causes of poor enrolment rates is the problem children have paying the annual school fees at secondary level[2] (8,000 cfa or £8) which, together with other levies amounting to £7 for school maintenance, building new classrooms, community teachers’ salaries (to make up the shortfall of teachers which the state cannot provide for all classrooms), for example, amounts to £15 per year. In addition to the fees and levies paid to the school there are other expenses such as buying school uniform, exercise books, maths sets, etc. The result is that children from low income families are often absent from school looking for ways of getting fees, their school performance goes down, they have to repeat classes and, in the end, they drop out of school altogether. It is common to find students in the 13^th grade, the last secondary school grade, who have repeated two years in secondary school, not to mention repetition in the primary grades also. Each year’s repetition makes schooling more expensive for the family.

A group of young at-risk, secondary students got together in Parakou in 2004, and gave themselves the name APEED, l’Association pour l’Education des Enfants en Difficulté or More Schooling. It was the initiative of one of the students who himself had gone through very difficult times and had had to drop out of school several times. For the last three years, APEED has had a membership of over 100 secondary students. They are still all in school, apart from the founder-chair of APEED who is now 25 years old. The association has :

• § Lobbied the provincial education department for fees exemptions for 12-15 students in 7^th-13^th grades (the secondary cycle in Benin) over the last three years.

• § Raised funds to distribute learning materials worth £6 per child, to 110 students in 2006/7. In 2007/8 it is hoped to raise the assistance to £11 per child.

• § Organised free tuitions twice a week for all APEED members.

• § Set up a little library of textbooks and readers which also serves as a study centre for secondary students with no place to study at home.

APEED’s one hundred members are all secondary students. The involvement, initiative and perseverance of these youngsters is admirable. They have achieved so much and all alone, without any adults to help them. They set up a Management Committee of three members and an Executive Bureau, with eleven members. All pupils. At APEED’s annual general meeting in 2006, the National Coordinator of Derana (a prominent NGO in Parakou working on adult literacy) was present, the Regional Director of CAEB (a national structure with regional outreach, addressing the problems of children in difficulty) and an Australian couple who have recently started to fund raise on behalf of APEED.

Over the years, the Regional Director of CAEB has given advice to APEED and so has the Regional Office of the Ministry of Justice. Concrete help came last year from Derana which has most generously given time to provide very useful, free, expert training in financial management to APEED’s Management Committee. Hence the appearance for the first time of a well presented budget.

Sources of Financial Inputs - over three years

• § Parakou Red Cross has let APEED temporarily use one of its rooms for its library, which doubles as the APEED office and meeting room.
• § A young Australian couple visiting Parakou, raised £660 in 2006 from their friends, and will possibly be in a position to send more in 2007 if the programme meets the approval of Australian fund raisers.
• § The shop Boutique Amitié in town donated exercise books for 110 students, worth £660.
• § The Regional Education Office provided fees exemptions: 7 students in 2006665/6; 14 in 2006/7 (worth £210); 7 expected in 2007/8.
• § Derana provided 28 hours of training in financial management, a gift in kind worth £140.
• § Another literacy NGO in the town, Sianson, donated £6 from the staff.
• § CAEB provided two bursaries totalling £50.

It is significant that the Municipal Council has not yet given assistance to APEED. No request has yet gone to them, but one is now being prepared.

PROPOSED PROGRAMMING FOR THE NEXT THREE YEARS

Three education specialists offered their technical assistance to APEED on 23 June 2007, as friends of the organisation, to provide technical insights on their programme to date. They made recommendations, presented to APEED on 25 June 2007, which are reprinted below. The Director of Derana joined the deliberations and also supported the recommendations made, together with the Northern Region UNICEF Education Officer.

“We warmly congratulate APEED for all the work that the organisation has done up to now especially since this is an organisation led solely by young people. These secondary students took the initiative all on their own, launched themselves into action to assist their brothers and sisters facing difficulties like their own.

It is clear, however, that APEED could benefit from the advice of adults, from education specialists and NGO experts, and achieve even more than they have to date. APEED could: expand its vision, reach more children, extend its activities and could strengthen the organisational structure that the youth have already established so effectively. The challenge is to give concrete support to the organisation, without taking it out of the hands of its young members, and to strengthen their management and planning skills.

RECOMMENDATIONS

We envisage the strengthening of APEED’s organisational  structures:

Existing committees	Committees to be added
Management Committee	A steering committee
Executive Bureau	A (beneficiary) selection committee
(secretariat functioning from the 2 above committees)	Skills capacity building for (voluntary) secretariat members

• § An adult presence in APEED: in our view, the organisation needs a steering committee made up of ‘elders’ and it needs support from some of the prominent figures in the town, to give APEED credibility when approaching the authorities and other future partners, and to guarantee the quality of the services given by APEED.

Recommendation 1: Set up a steering committee to include some prominent Parakou citizens, local education specialists, experienced advisors in NGO work and in programme management, and student representatives.

Since APEED is a youth organisation, the role of the steering committee would be advisory. It would also invite the views and expertise of a wide range of other actors, to recommend ways forward for the organisation.

• § Young adults: APEED does not at present include the involvement of young adults from the town, such as university students and young professionals who might be useful to APEED, assisting in the secretariat, for example, analysing documents and statistics with APEED, and meeting regularly for exchange of ideas with APEED’s young members.

Recommendation 2: Involve young adults from Parakou in assisting APEED.

• § The secretariat: The secretariat has been run in an ad hoc fashion by individuals from the Management Committee and the Executive Bureau. One could envisage that young adults wishing to help APEED could usefully play a role in strengthening the work of the secretariat.

Recommendation 3: Set up a small secretariat to keep documents in order, for general communication purposes, etc., giving specific tasks to the individuals concerned and providing them with training. The secretariat will need to be monitored and supervised effectively, even if irregularly.

• § Selection Committee: Before June 2007 beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries were mixed in all the APEED committees, even in the selecting body. A selection committee needs to be set up, of non-beneficiaries and non-potential beneficiaries, to avoid conflict of interest, including APEED youth, some members of the steering committee and individuals with an education and/or NGO background.

Recommendation 4: Set up a selection committee each year, separating out beneficiaries from non-beneficiaries.

• § Skills needed by APEED: the three management committees will need training/refresher session in NGO management skills, in NGO programming and in team building (teams to be established within the organisation). Funds need to be raised in future for such training, for a series of trainings, which could be run by Derana (possibly in collaboration with other competent NGOs such as CAPID who are experienced trainers).

Recommendation 5: Organise the following types of training for APEED managers: a. NGO management b. NGO programming c. team building

The modules of each training programme would last several hours, extended over a period of time to be determined by the participants, and followed up six or eight months later and again at regular intervals in the life of APEED, with a view to sustained capacity building within the organisation..

• § Collaboration: Sister organisations and groups are working with children living in difficult circumstances in Parakou. It would be useful to contact them in order to ensure efficient sharing of work across the town.

Recommendation 6: Make plans to identify other organisations working with children living in difficult circumstances in Parakou and in the region.

ACTIVITIES

I.   Extension and Consolidation of Existing Activities

A.  School fees assistance (full and partial bursaries)

B.  Provision of learning materials

C.  Reconceptualising the role of the APEED library

D.  Review of tuitions

E.  Strengthening the organisational structure of APEED

F.  Fund raising: private sector (individuals, merchants, NGOs, mosque and church organisations, etc.)

• II. New Activities Proposed to APEED

1. Collaboration with sister organisations and government structures
2. Helping APEED members help others/Involving APEED parents
3. Increasing the quality of education provided for APEED learners
4. Planning and programming

These activities are all an extension of APEED’s existing activities or they are designed to strengthen their ongoing activities, as explained below.

G. 2007/8 - Collaboration

1 - Identification and involvement with other organisations assisting children in difficulty so as to strengthen joint efforts and to make APEED’s work more efficient. Discussions with other organisations will help to identify unmet gaps of assistance in the town, to best select action for APEED, to rationalise APEED’s programmes; to give APEED the opportunity of learning from more experienced organisations in the region and, at times, to work in collaboration with other organisations, see Activities A-F above.

2 - Starting 2008 - Finding support for the families of APEED beneficiaries: One of the best ways to help low income families is to provide access to microcredit. Again, in a spirit of collaboration and with a view to optimizing existing opportunities, APEED should address requests to microcredit organisations in the region, so that  APEED families and, even APEED school graduates, could in future be included in the microcredit programmes. Microcredit activities will neither be organised nor financed by APEED. The role of APEED will merely be to contact microcredit organisations and to attract them into Parakou, and put them in contact with poor APEED families. Such an action will serve to strengthen Activities A-D.

H. 2007/8 - Helping APEED members to help others

1 - Helping children more disadvantaged than themselves: APEED beneficiaries will be invited to get involved in projects helping children who are more disadvantaged than they are: children who have already dropped out of school and unschooled children. For example, APEED students might give up one Saturday afternoon per fortnight to organise sports activities for other children in their own schools or on municipal sports grounds, once they have been trained in such activities. Adult supervision will be needed to ensure the quality of the service. This type of activity will complement the benefits received by APEED beneficiaries. See Activities A-D above.

2 - APEED beneficiary involvement in fund raising: Students could organise cultural or sports activities to raise funds for APEED. This type of activity will complement the benefits received by APEED beneficiaries and the action of APEED donors to date. See Activities A-D above.

I -   2008/9 - Increasing the quality of education provided for APEED learners:

1 - Refresher and upgrading courses for secondary teachers, teachers of APEED students: The programmes should include the routine pedagogical training but also orientation into approaches to teaching and morally supporting students at risk of dropping out of school. Keeping children at school is not simply a question of providing fees and learning materials. Support includes ensuring that they learn effectively and that they progress. Hence the need to provide good quality teaching and appropriate psychological support from teachers for needy students. See Activities A-D above.

2 - 2008/9 - Training primary community teachers: In the APEED secondary beneficiary families there are primary school children who will have problems getting into secondary school and staying there if they are not good performers at primary level. The principal determinant of good learning is the teacher, who needs proper training. However, many of the teachers at primary levelin Benin are ‘community’ teachers, recruited to fill vacant places, paid by parents’ levies, but who have neither the training or skills for teaching. It is recommended as a longterm measure for improving the performance of APEED secondary students, that APEED resources be allocated to training some primary teachers, for primary teachers working in the schools attended by APEED beneficiaries’ younger siblings. See Activities A-D.

3 - 20087/8  - English classes have been offered, free, to APEED secondary students by a Peace Corps teacher in the town. This could usefully strengthen English language learning among APEED students, since English is becoming more and more important in the North, and in Benin in general, particularly in ICT related jobs. Good performance in English will encourage the children to do better in their other subjects.

J - Planning and programming:

1 - Monitoring and evaluation - Planning and implementing the M & E process: In 2007/8 regular monitoring of APEED activities will be carried out for the first time. The first evaluation could be planned for July 2009. M&E processes are a necessary part of programming.

2 - Designing a three-year actioin plan, 2008/9-2010/11 and development of a vision and a longterm strategic plan for APEED. The planning process will ensure the viability of future APEED action and effective reorientation of the current programme.”

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[1] Annuaire Statistique. Année Scolaire 2005-2006. Provisoire. Porto-Novo : SSGI/DPP/MEPS.

[2] Secondary schools include both lycées, the classic high school, and CEGs, collèges d’enseignement général, which started out as junior secondary schools but have now grown into full secondary schools offering the baccalauréat or A-level like the lycées, due to demand which was unmet by the better resourced and therefore more costly (to the government) classic high schools.