Street Child is delighted to announce that we have accepted an invitation to join the Strategic Advisory Group of the UNICEF-led Child Protection 'Area of Responsibility' (CPAoR) of the Global Protection Cluster. The CPAoR coordinate the critical actions of child protection agencies in all major humanitarian crises. Street Child is already a strong partner of the CPAoR, delivering a major localisation project together, aimed at driving local leadership, and participation, in country and regional-level child protection mechanisms. In addition, Street Child recently became a 'standby-partner' of the CPAoR, seconding a team member to the CPAoR's Rapid Response Team to support the global COVID-19 child protection response. Street Child joins the SAG as a 7th INGO member alongside World Vision, International Rescue Committee (IRC), Plan International, War Child Holland, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) & Save the Children. Several UN and related agencies, and uniquely (and excellently), a number of national NGOs complete the group.
In August, Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the global fund for education in emergencies prominently featured the work of Street Child Nigeria in their 2019 results report and accompanying press releases. ECW gave over a page of its annual report detailing the impact of Street Child's work with 5,206 vulnerable and out of school children in the North-East Nigeria war-zone. Distinctively for an emergencies programme, beyond the delivery of agreed activities, Street Child robustly captured children's impressive learning gains - such as the proportion of children able to read words rising from 9% to 43% over the 6-months of the programme, based on the TARL (Teaching At the Right Level) approach. In April, Street Child further strengthened its ties with Education Cannot Wait by taking on the position of co-lead of the CSO Implementers Group; and in June was delighted to have the opportunity to work very closely with ECW leadership in the design of fresh guidance aimed at supporting modalities in which greater proportions of ECW funds could flow to local NGOs, through positive partnerships with INGOs.
Street Child's COVID-19 work, in particular our drive to increase resources for local organisations, was also recognised in August by the Roddenberry Foundation who announced Street Child as one of four finalists in the humanity category of their annual prize. Over 2,000 organisations applied to the 2020 Roddenberry Awards. The Humanity award, one of four categories, was ultimately won by 'Generation', with Street Child recognised alongside Translators Without Borders and Acumen.
Finally, in addition to their main report in December, in July the Centre for Global Development (CGD) released individual reports for each of the operators of schools in Liberia's 3-year public-private education innovation - initially known as Partnership Schools Liberia ('PSL') then re-branded as the Liberian Education Advancement Programme ('LEAP'). Street Child's report, which represents the most rigorous independent, stand-alone document assessing the impact of a Street Child project to date, can be accessed here.
Under PSL/LEAP, eight operators were assigned Government Primary schools to manage, with the advancements they achieved in learning outcomes, in particular, being compared with results in comparable Liberian Government Primary schools outside the programme under a rigorous Randomised Control Trial (RCT) lead by CGD's highly regarded team. Street Child's results are a stunning endorsement of our approach - with Street Child delivering a 'value for money' performance on a different to level to all other operators. The evaluation identifies Street Child as one of four operators posting 'statistically significant learning gains'. However, all three of the other operators achieved these gains by spending between 2.5 and seven times more per child than Street Child's $37 p/head average, compared to the next cheapest of $100 p/head. Moreover, the evaluation also notes that Street Child achieved their results without other significant negative side-effects that variously significantly detracted from the overall assessment of two of the other four operators with high-end learning gains - including child protection abuses, reducing overall attendance and teacher-churn. These significant results featured in The Economist in January.