By Chernor Alimamy Kamara
Over one hundred thousand school-going children from primary one (1) to six (6) across three hundred and twenty-five (325) schools nationwide are said to have benefited under the Sierra Leone Education Innovation Challenge (SLEIC) programme.
The programme is a partnership involving the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education (MBSSE), the Directorate of Science and Technology (DSTI) and the Education Outcomes Fund (EOF).
The EOF which is a hosted trust fund at UNICEF launched what they referred to as the ‘largest’ outcomes fund for education at Radisson Blu Hotel on Thursday, 1st September 2022.
In his statement during the launch, the Minister of MBSSE, Dr. David Moinina Sengeh noted that the government of Sierra Leone is very much excited about partnering with EOF to launch the Sierra Leone Education Innovation Challenge. He said the programme will directly support children across the country and generate important evidence in which innovative education interventions can help drive foundational learning outcomes for all children.
“It is a perfect example of how we leverage innovation to transform our education service delivery and financing to deliver on the government’s promise of free quality school education for all,” he said.
He pointed out that, using an outcomes-based approach, the organization involved will be paid once their interventions have shown improvements in children’s literacy and numeracy. He said the organizations that are involved are a mixture of both local and global providers including National Youth Awareness Forum, Rising Academies, Street Child, EducAID and Save the Children.
Minister Sengeh stated that the programme will be rigorously evaluated to understand its impact on learning, enabling evaluators to identify the approaches that are more effective. He went on to say that, the approach utilizes social impact bonds, a model that he said has been successfully implemented in other sectors, on a smaller scale.
He commended EOF which he said has taken the steps in its programmatic approach to help scale up the output of impact bonds for its programmes. He pointed out that the programme will have sustainability at its core.
Dr. Sengeh emphasized that EOF interventions are designed to be both affordable and scalable, noting that government can incorporate them into future education policy and scale up the most impactful approaches to a national level after the programme would have finished in 2025.
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of EOF, Dr. Amel Karboul noted that they faced an unprecedented global learning crisis which she said requires a different approach to funding education programmes and measuring their impacts. She said access to quality education improves lives and livelihoods, noting that education equals opportunity.
“We are working with the Sierra Leonean government to develop programmes that are evidence-driven, enable innovation, and most importantly, measurably improve the quality of education for children and young people in the country,” she said.
She pointed to 2018 which she said the Sierra Leone government made education more accessible through the Free Quality School Education (FQSE) policy that eliminated school fees in public schools which she said helped improve attendance and increased school access for 700,00 students. She added that their main aim currently is to improve the quality of education through SLEIC and for which they are providing 1.5 million dollars in funding the programme.
Dr. Karboul reiterated that, given the current education challenges in Sierra Leone, a child can complete 8-9 years, rather than the actual 4-5 years of actual learning. She pointed to as recent as 2014 when she said 87 percent of primary two (2) students aged between seven to eight years, were considered illiterate.
She highlighted that governments around the world have shown interest in innovation approaches, and emphasized that EOF will develop a broad pipeline of opportunities beyond Sierra Leone to support learning and employment outcomes for 10 million children and young people around the world.
SLEIC is an 18 million dollar programme that has been co-financed by the government of Sierra Leone and international donors that will fund five, child and education-focused organizations, to improve children’s literacy and numeracy outcomes in state primary schools, with a particular focus on improving girls’ education outcomes.
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