EDUCATING CHILDREN
our approach
1 in 10 children are out of school.
1 in 4 children who complete school are still not able to write or count.
Street Child work with a network of local partners to ensure every child has access to an education, especially in low resource environments and emergencies. Our interventions are integrated, coupling instantaneous change for children alongside increasing the capacity of caregivers, communities and schools to support sustainable, long term change.
Working to ensure children are safe, in school and learning sits at the heart of everything Street Child do.
From rural areas that have never had a school, to classrooms that have been destroyed because of disaster or conflict, millions of children are unable to go to school across the world today simply because there are no schools for them to go to.
We work with communities to build schools in rural areas and this sits at at the heart of our education work. We began building 'first-ever schools' in 2010 for some of the most remote communities in the highly rural Tambakha Chiefdom in northern Sierra Leone.
For children who are in school, many schools are not good enough quality with hundreds of students per classroom and a lack of capable teachers.
We have trained and supported over 9,000 teachers with training, professional development programmes and to complete government-recognised training courses. Many more teachers have benefited from more specialised interventions on topics such as 'disaster risk resilience' and 'education in emergencies'.
To ensure the long term success of education we support schools to find way of paying teachers and affording the costs of education by helping communities grow their income. For example, we have provided school management committees with agricultural grants and technical support to develop businesses such as rice farms where the profits made following harvest help to meet educational costs. In Sierra Leone in 2021 we set up 80 income generating initiatives in rural primary schools.
Parental and community attitudes can often also hold back children's education, especially for girls from late primary-school age and upwards, stopping them from going to school or making them earn a living for the family instead of getting an education. Street Child programmes work with the community to improve the status of girls by shaping the gender norms held by young fathers and community leaders. In Uganda, the "Change the Story" project increased the literacy and numeracy of levels of over 2,000 young mothers.
the impact of our education programmes
412,955
Children have been directly supported to access education.
682
Schools have been supported either through construction or renovation to improve learning environments and 466 temporary learning spaces constructed in emergency contexts.
12,624
Teachers benefitted from training/mentoring or getting formal qualifications.