Morocco – Improving Training for Quality Advancement in National Education

Program

1 min read

Creative’s Improving Training for Quality Advancement in National Education project supported Morocco’s Education Ministry in improving teachers’ pedagogical practice, preventing middle school dropouts, and developing innovative and practical teacher training materials for nationwide use. It was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

In its nearly five years, the project delivered in-service professional development to more than 3,000 teachers. Meanwhile, more than 4,400 newly recruited teacher trainers received pre-service coursework.

Creative worked with the Education Ministry to update 12 middle school teacher training modules, integrating e-learning into some of these modules and extending the scope of training to in-service as well as pre-service teachers.

Creative partnered with the International Youth Foundation to introduce Life Skills Clubs into the after-school offerings of more than 95 percent of middle schools in the two regions. More than 650 teachers were trained to deliver the Life Skills curriculum, and the clubs reached nearly 10,500 students. Participating students tripled their scores on a test of employability skills, while a control group improved their skills by only a few percentage points.

Youth Speak, a youth-led research activity, engaged young people in an open dialogue about the causes for dropout and the possible solutions to the problem.

Through these and other factors, the dropout rate saw an 18.77 percent decrease nationally and a 44.23 percent decrease in the project’s two target regions (Doukkala-Abda and Fes-Boulmane).

Libya – Engagement and Governance through Applied Learning

Program

1 min read

Following their revolution in 2011, Libyans embarked on the difficult task of transitioning to a democratic society. However, gaps in citizen knowledge about their new political process remained a challenge. In addition, civil society organizations, which played a major role in the drafting of a constitution, lacked the technical experience needed to fulfill their role in the new democracy.

Funded by the U.S.-Middle East Partnership Initiative, Creative’s Libyan Engagement and Governance through Applied Learning (LEGAL) project sought to strengthen the ability of civil society organizations to build regional and national consensus and to influence Libya’s formal constitutional drafting process.

Through local partners in Libya’s historic regions of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and Fezzan, LEGAL formed regional advocacy committees and citizen public forums that brought Libyans together to discuss local and national issues and develop an advocacy plan for articulating these concerns to the drafting bodies. These committees and public forums ensured that citizens—particularly women, minorities, and populations outside major urban areas—were engaged, heard, and drove the drafting of the new constitution.

Creative had already begun issuing grants to civil society organizations. In spring 2014, the program conducted workshops for Libyan civil society organizations, delivering modules to 40 participants from across the country on consensus building for constitution-making, advocacy methods, women’s rights, and youth development. LEGAL also trained delegates of Libya’s Constitutional Drafting Assembly on the process of constitution writing.

Jordan – Learning Environment Technical Support

Program

1 min read

Creative’s Learning Environment Technical Support program worked with the Jordanian Ministry of Education to improve the atmosphere in 120 public schools. It focused on safety, health, caring, and engagement. The program was supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The program supported these efforts by introducing best practice approaches at the school level. Educators identified the most pressing needs and led the community in addressing them. Activities included anti-bullying seminars, school clean-up days, art contests, and teacher training courses.

The Learning Environment Technical Support program expanded the Ministry of Education’s ability to support schools as they tried to improve their learning environments and increased the overall capacity of local training institutions.

The program built awareness within school communities to create positive learning behaviors and higher school achievement. It also made significant strides in reducing violence and bullying, as well as increasing healthy behaviors and effective communication between schools and the community.

Within three semesters, nearly 50 percent of participating schools demonstrated that the program interventions were correlated with a drop in negative behavior. Girls’ schools showed the highest drop in negative behaviors, at 71 percent, with boys demonstrating a drop of 45 percent.

Jordan – Education Reform Support Program

Program

2 min read

Education has played a transformative role in the development of Jordan from an agrarian, subsistence economy to a predominantly urban, industrialized nation. In July 2003, the government launched the Education Reform for the Knowledge Economy initiative, which is intended to upgrade the education sector and provide more comprehensive and appropriate services to its graduates.

The five-year Education Reform Support Program partnered with Jordan’s Ministry of Education to achieve the country’s national reforms. Professional development for teachers and principals, high-quality early childhood education, targeted training for youth in technology and life skills for careers and robust data collection combined to transform how children and youth learn in Jordan. The program was supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Together with the Ministry of Education, Creative’s program created a cadre of trainers equipped with skills to develop qualified and confident teachers through professional development. The program prepared 475 Ministry Trainers and reached almost 12,000 educators, principals and school supervisors with professional development training designed to improve pedagogy and learning in schools.

Creative teamed with the Ministry of Education to launch a Data Use for Decision Making initiative that allows Jordan’s educators to have access to information such as attendance rate and student achievement. Creative trained school principals and staff on the new uses of data, how to generate reports and how to analyze the data when making important decisions.

The program also worked to improve early childhood education, refurbishing 544 public kindergarten classrooms nationwide, renovating school playgrounds and training more than 5,000 kindergarten and grade one through three teachers on how to best use new facilities and teaching methods for better student learning outcomes. The Early Childhood Education programs improved the learning environments for more than 10,000 students.

For children unable to attend public kindergarten, the Education Reform Support Program’s Parent-Child Package program provided an at-home education program with trained teachers. Simultaneously, mothers were trained on strategies to use at home to promote their children’s school readiness, like using play dough to write letters, puppets to teach sharing and beans to count. More than 2,450 mothers participated.

Through its focus on Youth, Technology and Career Development, the program improved the confidence, learning, life skills and workforce readiness of youth nationwide. The School to Career initiative, a career counseling and job skills program for youth, reached more than 130,000 youth in 330 schools. The Life Skills through Sports program reached another 20,000 students.

Working closely with the Ministry of Education throughout the five-year program to build national capacity in education, the Education Reform Support Program ensured the continued success of Jordan’s schools and students and the sustainability of educational reforms.

Digital development brings promise and challenges

August 4, 2014

5 min read

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Digital development brings promise and challenges

By Jennifer Brookland

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Children in Mtwara, Tanzania use ICT to enhance their reading skills. ICT4D principles encourage designers to work with them in mind.

Despite its relative youth, the digital development community has set forth nine Principles for Digital Development to overcome problems that have plagued the industry from the get-go.

Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICT4D) practitioners hope these “living guidelines” inform the design of technology-enabled development programs and help avoid common pitfalls: siloed initiatives, uncoordinated implementers, inflexible donors and an overabundance of unscaleable and unsustainable small projects.

A forum at Creative Associates International on July 31 engaged them in a discussion on Principle number one: Design with the user.

As a tenet, designing with the user elicits little controversy. But for implementers, it’s hard to actually employ.

“Designing for the user is simple in theory. Less so in practice,” says Panthea Lee, Lead Designer and Principal at social impact firm Reboot.

She says good examples from the private sector’s ability to pivot and respond to customer needs belie the complexity of doing the same thing in development.

“When we talk about user-centered design people often point to the private sector as having really good examples of how we should be doing it,” Lee says. “In the development space, we have to contend with multiple stakeholders, complex politics and environments we don’t always know very well.”

Let the user lead the way

To get to know those environments a whole lot better, Dianna Kane and her design team at Medic Mobile ask Nurse Mary, who works at an under-resourced clinic four hours from the nearest hospital.

Or Prudence, the pregnant woman who delivered her first three children at home and has no interaction with the healthcare system.

Mary and Prudence don’t exist in reality, per se, but they are two of four “user personas” the startup queries as it designs mobile health initiatives in 21 countries.

“We don’t start with technology, we start with people,” says Kane, Medic Mobile’s senior designer, who calls human-centered design as much a mindset as a methodology. “It takes a lot of complex issues and brings us back to the four of them. Their approval is how we measure success as a team.”

And, she says, it’s something you can’t fake. “We actually have to care about our users in order to gain meaningful insight that will transfer into tools.”

Medic Mobile also uses sketches, illustrated cards and role-playing to invite participation in the design process by the very people they hope will use the technology being developed. They take a look at the workarounds people are already using—prime clues as to where technological interventions might be embraced and impactful.

“We want Nurse Mary to feel like this was a platform designed for her,” says Kane. “And we want it to do the kinds of things she needs it to do to have a greater impact on her community.”

Getting donors on board

In this way a design with the user approach is explicitly geared toward serving users and not customers.

That can make it a lot trickier to “sell” to donors. It also means implementing partners who act without strong donor support for user-centered design assume a lot of risk.

“It’s really a scary thing for designers to go into a completely new set of users and have to promise something to donors,” says Kane.

Organizations rarely have flexible funding, and feel pressured to get things done quickly. With the seemingly incongruous timeline required to design with the user, it is unclear which donors will be on board.

Fora like this one are being held, in part, so the ICT4D community can present a united front when they explain to clients the importance of designing with the user.

The ICT4D community can’t afford not to, in Kane’s opinion. “It’s more expensive to design something that fails,” she says.

And she foresees organizational costs coming down. “Once you have some best practices based on robust design work and analysis, you can have a much leaner process so that you’re not starting from scratch every time.”

Design for aspiration

When Tapan Parikh was advising Indian social media startup Awaaz.De on increasing the engagement of farmers with a call-in radio show, he wanted to meet the users where they were. He analyzed their context, motivations and abilities, and came up with a system that allowed callers to leave messages.

That was just the beginning. An assistant professor at UC Berkeley, Parikh realized he could do better than meeting the user where they are. He’d meet them where they wanted to be.

“Something I’d like to propose is trying to design for where users want to be, or where they will be tomorrow, in a week, a month, a year or five years.” Parikh says. “Design for aspiration.”

Parikh encouraged Awaaz.De to introduce a browse, search and filter capacity so the farmers could hear all the questions that were being posed to the radio hosts. In a 2010 evaluation, farmers said the biggest benefit was learning from the questions and experiences of others.

The next design step was to take users from consuming and responding to content and allow them to actually create it. Awaaz.De became a voice-based, phone-based content publishing platform that made it easy for farmers to broadcast information to each other.

Parikh envisions the next phase of design to accommodate the move to smart phones. Not because the farmers have them. But because they will.

The next frontier of designing for the user in general is to make not only interfaces user-friendly, but to design the actual databases behind the tools with the user, too.

And yet the forum served to remind the ICT4D community not to get carried away with the next exciting technological intervention without keeping the user at the fore.

“We’re constantly talking about newer and more exciting technologies,” says Lee. “But part of the challenge is, do we ourselves understand whether we as a development community can use, for example, the big data that’s coming in?”

“People forget that by inserting technology, it’s still development,” she says. Technology offers great promise but no respite from the need to adhere to conventional development principles as well. “You still need to have those in-depth discussions.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/12″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_widget_sidebar sidebar_id=”sidebar-primary”][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Why Traveling for Work is Awful, and the Best

July 24, 2014

3 min read

Jennifer learning a song from environmental educators near Jacquesil, Haiti.

It happened the first time in Honduras, where my organization had sent me to document programmatic success. We had rushed around all day, flinging wires and lights around, lugging our cameras and backpacks from interview to interview, scribbling notes and shaking hands. When we collapsed for lunch at 3:30 we were exhausted. And there it was. Right across the street. With all of its 31 flavors. A Baskin Robbins. The kind of American chain I had promised myself I would never, ever patronize on a trip to another country.

A few months later, I was in Panama. And so was a Subway. I don’t know how to say “sandwich artist” in Spanish but I listened to the man in front of me say “con todo” as he gestured toward the row of excruciatingly familiar washed-out tomato slices and leaking pickles. So I said it too, and walked away with the sinking, guilty sensation that I was having the same groaning sandwich I might have had on any Wednesday in my hometown.

What was I becoming? I had gone to so many countries where I railed against being a tourist, and sought instead to be a traveler. Where I insisted on experiencing the culture, the food and the people even at some cost to my ego, wallet and digestive tract.

And yet here I was after lunch, in a taxi in a country I might never return to, listening to the driver tell me the Panama Canal was five minutes away and hearing myself respond, “Just keep going, we don’t have time for that.”

As a communications writer for an international development organization, I love that my job lets me occasionally travel the world. And yet it’s not the kind of traveling I love.

Instead of following a gap-toothed stranger through the curling stone streets of Lamu, Kenya to find the house of the man who sells heart-shaped labania, I check my watch from the backseat of a seatbeltless sedan and calculate the minutes until we are officially late to a meeting.

Instead of playing a game of pick-up soccer with barefoot neighborhood kids, I’m silently urging the photographer to hurry up and capture their carefree smiles for the cover of our next case study.

As I rush around checking items off my to-do list, I rarely get the chance to cross things off my bucket list.

But maybe I’ve been writing down the wrong things. Sure, on that trip to Honduras, I never got to snorkel in Roatán or see the Mayan ruins near Copán. But I laughed with my local film crew over a bean-and-mayonnaise sandwich I didn’t quite mean to order, and felt inspired as I followed a grandmother around the barrio she was trying to save from gang violence.

I never got the chance to buy any of the famous metalwork when I went on a work trip to Haiti. But a local woman taught me all the gestures to a lilting folk song as we motored a small fishing boat into the Atlantic, and my mouth filled with decadent sweetness as I squished a fresh chunk of honeycomb that a young beekeeper slid to me atop his machete.

I never did visit the Panama Canal. I guess I’ll have to go back.

And when I do, these frantic trips spent focused on work will allow me to bring a deeper understanding than I would have gained from trying to find the most authentic experience on my own.

I’ll know that just around the corner a bunch of kids whose parents are in opposing gangs are playing a ping pong tournament together, and learning about nutrition from a volunteer husband-and-wife duo who dress up as clowns.

I’ll know that there’s an old woman in knee socks who comes to feed the pigeons out of a floppy woven basket in the square in front of the Iglesia de los Delores, and that a group of retired soccer referees meet on the Parque Central benches every Thursday morning to gab.

And I’ll know that when I get sick of bean and mayonnaise sandwiches, or whatever other local delicacy I’ve ruthlessly hunted down, and when doing my job has left me haggard and overheated, there will probably be a Baskin Robbins just around the corner.

By Jennifer Brookland

To End Preventable Child Deaths, Look Beyond Health

June 27, 2014

3 min read

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Educating girls is key to helping every child reach their fifth birthday.

Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, World Bank President Jim Kim and U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Rajiv Shah are sharing their baby photos to honor the millions of children around the world who will celebrate their fifth birthdays. This playful effort is part of a serious initiative; the 5^th Birthday and Beyond campaign was launched by a coalition of more than 100 organizations to celebrate the tremendous progress to end preventable child and maternal deaths around the world.

Annual under-five deaths have fallen dramatically. “Every day this year 18,000 more children will live and 700 more mothers will survive compared to the daily maternal and child mortality rate in 1990,” says Shah.

Yet despite these gains, much work remains to be done. This year 6.6 million children will die before their fifth birthday. These children mostly live in poor countries and their deaths are largely preventable. In 2012, 98.6 percent of under-5 deaths globally occurred in the developing world.

Only 27 developing countries are expected to achieve Millennium Development Goal 4: to reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate.

Creative Associates International is committed to the goal of ending preventable child and maternal deaths. Creative’s expertise in education, especially in conflict-affected areas, provides a way in.

Education, especially girls’ education, is essential to achieving the goal of ending preventable child and maternal deaths and helping every child to reach their fifth birthday.

According to UNESCO, children of mothers with secondary education or higher are twice as likely to survive beyond age five as those whose mothers have no education. Moreover, each extra year of a mother’s schooling reduces the probability of infant mortality by 5 to 10 percent.

The benefits of girls’ education are immense, extending to decreased fertility rates, improvements in child and maternal health and increased earning potential.

Girls and women with at least some formal education are more likely to use contraception, marry later, have fewer children, and be better informed on the nutritional and other needs of their children. Furthermore, education decreases a girl’s or woman’s risk for contracting HIV or transmitting HIV to her baby.

On June 25, USAID hosted Acting on the Call: Ending Preventable Child and Maternal Deaths, a high-level forum in which it unveiled an action plan to realign its $2.9 billion maternal and child health portfolio over the next three years in an effort to end preventable child and maternal health by 2020.

The action plan delineates how 24 priority countries will dramatically accelerate progress in maternal and child survival.

The plan encourages using education to improve health outcomes. It suggests that in India, for example, partners should do more to invest in adolescents with a holistic approach to breaking down education related barriers and enhancing life skills development. In Afghanistan, it recommends including health education into the existing education system.

It points out that the immediate causes of under-nutrition in children rest atop a host of underlying factors, including: education, women’s empowerment and child marriage.

Of USAID’s priority countries, Creative Associates International works, or has recently worked, in Afghanistan, Nigeria, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia to contribute to the goal of ending preventable child deaths by improving child learning and helping children stay in school.

Creative believes that every child deserves a fifth birthday.

Join us in our commitment to ending preventable child and maternal deaths by uploading a fifth birthday or age-5 photo to the birthday album![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Youth “speaks” out on the importance of education in Morocco

June 25, 2014

3 min read

Youssef Bidar, a 16 year-old from Morocco, was invited to meet with other youth leaders and speak at the 2014 InterAction Forum in Washington, D.C.

Youssef Bidar is a 16 year-old from a remote, rural town in the Doukkala-Abda province of Morocco. It is the country’s poorest area and, despite the fact that there are few productive opportunities awaiting children who leave school, one with a shockingly high number of dropouts.

None of his older siblings completed high school, and for a long time, Youssef didn’t think he would either. But Youssef’s path took a very different turn. And it lead him last week to a once-in-a lifetime opportunity: participating in the 2014 Interaction Forum through the support of the Alliance for International Youth Development (AIYD) and Creative Associates International.

Each year at the Forum, AIYD convenes a delegation of young people who have made an extraordinary impact in their communities. It is a way to bring youth voice to the important discussions at the Forum and raise the potential of young people as contributors and change makers in development work.

Youssef was one of five outstanding young leaders selected to share his experience at the Forum.

He spoke about how Creative selected him as one of 24 young “Youth Speak” researchers across the country to document the factors that lead youth to drop out of school – and to propose factors to mitigate early dropout.

One of six children in a poor family—he is the son of a shoe maker—Youssef was selected as a Youth Speak researcher in part because he was considered to be “at risk” of dropping out: He was not engaged in school activities, was increasingly absent or tardy from class, and was not performing well on his exams.

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Shortsighted in South Sudan

June 16, 2014

3 min read

South Sudan's National Election Commission is less than two years old yet operates without international guidance or support, eroding chances of credible elections. — South Sudan’s National Election Commission is less than two years old yet operates without international guidance or support, eroding chances of credible elections.

South Sudan’s 2010 elections and 2011 referendum are possibly the only positive experiences that the South Sudanese have had with political processes in their short history – and the electoral institutions that organized them are vital to the country’s ongoing peace process and to its political future. So why has international support to the National Election Commission come to a halt?

In conflict-prone and divided societies, the independence of the election management body is a key feature that can have a significant impact on peacebuilding.

South Sudan’s Electoral Commission was established as a body independent of the government with an authority to regulate, conduct and supervise electoral events; establish boundary delimitation; organize voter registration; and deliver civic education. In other words, it will decide highly politicized issues. Any actual or perceived malpractice could undermine the credibility of elections and lead to renewed violence.

Unfortunately, the Commission’s early tasks are currently taking place without any international advice or other types of support. With South Sudan having little experience with democratic processes, all Commissioners being new to the job and the organization of elections, the chances for credible elections are low without international guidance.

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“If You Know What Happiness is to You”

June 10, 2014

4 min read

Six of the seven Central American countries mad Gallup's list of happiest places in the world, according to their latest poll. — Six of the seven Central American countries made Gallup’s list of happiest places in the world, according to their latest poll.

It seems like being happy is en vogue in the international media these days. From the crackdown on Iranian youth making a video to Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” to various indices ranking the level of happiness of people living in the countries around the world, the debate over happiness is on.

Surprisingly (or not) the recent indices come up with somewhat different sets of rankings. To my joy, the latest poll by Gallup, done with 1,500 people from each of 138 countries, put four of the places I have lived or worked among the top 10 happiest places in the world (Panama, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala).

The odd juxtaposition is that these are also four countries that have been part of Creative’s joint programming with USAID that works to reduce the high levels of violence.

How does that mesh – when the people interviewed from a variety of income levels expressed high levels of “enjoyment,” “laughing or smiling a lot” and feeling “well-rested,” while also living in three of the countries (El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala) with the highest murder rates globally?

I was surprised with such positive responses from Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Hondurans to the happiness surveys given high level of gang violence and extortion by gangs. Notably, violence likely contributed to the fact that the least happy people according to this year’s survey, understandably so, are Syrians, Chadians and Yemenis.

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Zambia welcomes 100,000 new readers, one story at a time

June 4, 2014

3 min read

Tassew Mekuria, Director of Creative's Read to Succeed project in Zambia, addresses the audience at the breakfast ceremony announcing the expansion of Reading Tools in a Box. — Tassew Mekuria, Director of Creative’s Read to Succeed project in Zambia, addresses the audience at the breakfast ceremony announcing the expansion of Reading Tools in a Box.

Trucks are rumbling down the rural roads of Zambia carrying special packages as they travel to far-flung primary schools. Thousands of young students are about to receive fun and engaging reading materials in local languages—books and materials that enliven their basic classrooms and make reading enjoyable.

At a recent ceremony in Zambia’s capital city of Lusaka, Creative Associates International announced the expansion of its Reading Tools in a Box initiative, designed to build early-grade reading skills both in and out of the classroom.

Over the next few months, Creative will send 305 boxes, valued at nearly $55,000, to six provinces across Zambia.

Each box contains 10 illustrated books in local languages, five titles on basic life skills as well as additional materials designed to boost reading skills. All of the materials are colorful and fun, featuring interesting stories that children can read aloud and enjoy.

This initiative began as part of Read to Succeed, a U.S. Agency for International Development-funded project implemented by Creative, which aims to improve early-grade learner performance in reading.

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Libya – Community-Driven Grants Program II

Program

1 min read

In February 2011, a group of lawyers in Benghazi, Libya led a protest to call for the release of one of their colleagues. As they marched through the city, hundreds joined what became the first citizen-led uprising of the Libyan Revolution. Within months, the government of Muammar Gaddafi fell and these same civic leaders undertook another challenge: building the new democratic Libya.

With support from the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative, Creative launched the Community Driven Grants Program (CDGP) in September, 2011 to strengthen the capacities of civil society organizations at the center of that effort.

Through grants to partner organizations in Benghazi and Tripoli, CDGP promoted citizen participation in upcoming elections, computer skills for women, and vocational training for former fighters. Training activities brought organizations together to build core capacities in management and outreach.

Building on these successes, CDGP II is now expanding these initiatives in smaller cities across the country, with training activities particularly focused on strategies for using advocacy and government partnerships to increase government accountability at the national and local levels. It also encourages linkages and coalition building among regionally disparate civil society organizations.

Today, even amid renewed fighting among militias, Libya’s civil society continues to play a crucial role by supporting good governance at the local level. Through small grants and trainings, CDGP II continues to support their efforts to build a stable, democratic Libya that fulfills its citizens’ aspirations.