The project in brief

Implemented by

NVER

Country 

Kakuma refugee Camp - Kenya

Duration 

2 years

Description

We develop courses to teach English and mathematics to refugees that arrive to the camp with extremely low skills. We teach them to read and write in English as well to master basic arithmetic concepts.

These basic skills can help women and youngsters to acquire a job or even get enrolled in other educational programs.

Another key component of the initiative is that we give employment to other refugees as teachers. This allows to tackle another problem in the camp which is the low demand of labor.

Main activities of the Good Practice

1. Development of the content of the English and mathematic courses. It is important to incorporate the cultural background of the target audience.

2. Acquisition and production of necessary material for the courses.

3. Recruiting refugees that will work as teachers.

4. Training for the teachers.

5. Developing a randomized controlled trial for random selection of participants that consists of the following steps:

• Randomize small communities within the camp.
• Offering the courses to refugees within communities.
• Get a list of interested refugees to the courses.
• Select randomly only half of these refugees.
• Before the intervention gather demographic information and target outcomes of our intervention such as income, job status and other outcome variables for all interested refugees. (All refugees registered in list as point c explains)
• Gather information of all registered refugees after the courses.
• Use econometric techniques to evaluate the impact of our  courses.

6. Course provision to registered refugees.

7. Evaluation and delivering certificates to the students.

8. Follow up of the refugees registered as interested to be able to know the medium term impact of the intervention.

In order to measure the causal impact of our program we set the randomized control setting in point 5.

Challenges and how they were overcome 

• Developing teaching material that is appropriate for multicultural class.
• Recruiting teachers that will comply with all their obligations and that will not miss classes.
• Maintaining students motivation to attend to class.
• Women could be forbidden by their partners to attend to class.
• Climate conditions.
• Gathering quality data for the evaluation.

Results of the Good Practice 

• Provide quality courses to selected refugees.
• Increase the number of women and youngsters that speak English and have basic mathematical knowledge.
• Increase employment among treated women and youngsters. (Note: treated group is the group of refugees who had access to our training)
• Impact evaluation of our training to obtain policy conclusions.
• Identify challenges during the courses and the data gathering that could help improvement in later versions of our program.