Education for Empowerment (EfE)

This project draws largely on partnership - for instance, district education actors working together to improve education in deprived areas - in an effort to increase collaboration with various government and non-government (NGO) stakeholders to reach educational goals. To that end, EfE reaches out to teachers and volunteers in project areas in an effort to improve performance, good governance in local and national education systems - as well as to sustain accountability through partnership with state and non-state actors - in the following strategic areas of intervention:

• strengthening literacy and numeracy programmes
• empowering teachers
• improving educational opportunities for girls and young women
• applying the Teaching in Emergency model to the refugee situation in Ghana.

Ibis observes that large numbers of donor agencies and interventions in the districts have created a situation whereby programmes will require collaborative approaches to scale up in order to enhance the quality of education. Ibis plans to implement the programme through a coalition of civil society actors working on a district-wide scale by involving as many community/schools as possible in order to achieve impact and scale within the first two years of programming. This type of cooperation is intended to support communication strategies such as:

• the introduction of simple literacy methodologies by teachers who, having been sustained through increased teacher commitment, motivation, and empowerment for classroom change, will be able to impart the basic skills of reading and writing to their children
• increase in the literacy level of out-of-school children, including refugees, who would otherwise be unable to access formal education due to poverty and socio-cultural barriers. The strategy here includes enhancement of the capacity of NGOs to implement alternative education approaches
• improvement of the status of girls and gender equity within the education sector through the creation of opportunities for girls. This will be accomplished through the empowerment of female teachers as role models at the district level, support to girls through guidance and counselling in order to transfer to higher levels of education, the promotion of women and girls in non-traditional trades and vocations, and an increase in the number of girls willing to serve as volunteer teachers in rural areas
• increase in civil society participation in the education sector through creation of awareness of the need for collaboration and funding to NGO programming, more emphasis on attaining basic literacy within the formal education system, holding teachers and educationalists at district level accountable for performance and improving educational performance at all levels
• support for district educational authorities’ capacities to cope with increasing demands for more vigilance among their staff and agencies
• fulfilling the Ghanaian commitment to achieving Education for All (EFA) and the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of reducing poverty through educational development.

Children, Gender, Education.

According to Ibis, in rural areas only 8.7% of children within public schools at Primary Six level can read and write and 4.0% of children are numerate.

The EfE relates to the Education for All Framework (EFA), Education Strategic Plan of the Ghana Government and the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy’s key priority areas of poverty reduction and educational development.