Our Programs

Community-Driven Education (CDE)

Because Global Partners recognizes that education is exceedingly important in the fight against poverty and that schools are often the epicenter of development in a community, we strive to get and keep kids in rural areas into school by placing resources and decision-making power in the hands of local people. Global Partners mobilizes low performing primary schools and their communities to drive the identification, implementation, and sustainability planning of projects that impact student attendance and other education and public health outcomes.
As we continue to deepen our impact, we are partnering with new low-performing schools and their communities, many of which are located in hardship areas, and also implementing secondary projects at past CDE partner schools. Global Partners considers secondary projects at schools with highly successful initial partnerships, who maintain the projects over time (evaluated during follow-up assessments at regularly scheduled intervals), and who have significant remaining needs after the initial projects.
Examples of projects selected by East African schools and communities: classrooms, latrines (toilets), clean water projects (including boreholes, rainwater harvesting, solar water systems, and shallow wells), teacher housing, handwashing stations, security fencing, and desks.

Facts

Education in East Africa

Over one-fifth of children between the ages of 6 and 11 in Sub-Saharan Africa are out of school, followed by one-third of youth between the ages of about 12 and 14

Across sub-Saharan Africa, 9 million girls between the ages of about 6 and 11 will never go to school at all

47% of schools in East Africa lack basic sanitation services (toilets)

People with low literacy skills are more than twice as likely to be unemployed, and illiterate workers earn 30-42% less than literate workers

IMPACT ASSESSMENT

SINGIDA WASH AND EDUCATION PROGRAM, TANZANIA

Situated in the central mainland of Tanzania, Singida is a region divided into six districts with a population of 1,481,384 people. Despite having a population where 70% of its people fall under the age of 30, Singida is one of the poorest regions in the country.  Access to basic social services is poor as 43.3% of its population still access water from unimproved sources and only 30.5% have basic sanitation services with 85.7% using unimproved toilets.

GPFD’s Community-Driven Education and Development Model (CDE) seeks to stimulate quality of community education via active engagement and participation. This specific project provided funding for construction of two new classrooms in a community named Mughunga and pit latrines in Laghanida Primary School. Outcomes targeted by this model included the increased attendance to the school, quality teaching, and reduced incidence of hygiene related diseases. Read the full impact assessment report below.

Featured Project

Kaswanga Primary School, Kenya

Kaswanga Primary School is located in Suba North, Kenya, serves 389 students and has 10 teachers. The community consists of approximately 2,000 households, and most people earn a living by fishing in Lake Victoria. Due to restrictions on public gatherings due to COVID-19, the GPFD-Kenya team met with small groups of school and local leaders who helped disseminate information and solicit input from the larger community. The school’s latrines (toilets) were identified as the greatest need as they presented a significant danger to the students. The girls’ latrine had collapsed, and the teacher’s latrine block was almost full and likewise showing warning signs of collapse.

The soil at the school is clay, and there is a very high water table. To make the toilets at the school safe and sustainable, our engineering team designed four blocks of SanPlat latrines for girls, boys, teachers, and ECD (preschool) students. The SanPlat latrines use trapezoidal blocks to line the pits, which help guard against the latrines collapsing in the future. The local community also contributed to the success of this project by digging the latrine pits, providing timber, and transporting water for the project using donkey carts.

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