Evaluation of inclusive girls’ education project

Montrose have been contracted to provide longitudinal monitoring and evaluation of a seven-year education project for girls with disabilities, implemented by Cheshire Services Uganda. 

Situation:

The Girls Education Challenge Transition project, funded by DFID under the Girls' Education Challenge Fund, will develop and test strategies for improving education outcomes for girls with disabilities. The project will focus on girls at the primary and secondary level in four Kampala City divisions considered low income: Nakawa, Kawempe, Rubaga and Central. The goal of the project is to address the double marginalisation faced by these girls.

Over the implementation period of seven years the project aims to achieve the following outcomes:

• Improve literacy and numeracy outcomes for disabled girls in participating schools
• Improve retention and transition rates (across grades and across levels) for disabled girls in participating schools
• Improving education outcomes will be achieved through project interventions intended to provide material and psychosocial support to disabled girls and to enhance the capacity of schools, households and communities to meet the needs of girls with disabilities. The interventions will:
  • Improve daily school attendance of girls with disabilities;
  • Promote gender responsive and inclusive classroom practices;
  • Increase the self-esteem of girls with disabilities;
  • Foster positive attitudes and perceptions of stakeholders (parents, communities, teachers, school officials) regarding the potential and rights of girls with disabilities;
  • Enhance the livelihoods of participating girls’ households and increase household investment/support in education.

The project requires a robust monitoring and evaluation (M&E) framework to test the project’s theory of change and to provide evidence of what works and what does not work for the education of disabled girls. Formal Evaluation is a key component of the M&E framework and will be conducted by Montrose, acting as independent evaluators.

Solution:

Over the course of the project Montrose will conduct formal evaluation at four points, where data will be collected from a number of different sources in order to gather evidence about project outcomes (learning, transition, sustainability) and intermediate outcomes (attendance, teaching quality, self-esteem, attitudes, socio economic attributes). The evaluation points will be timed as follows: 2017/18 (baseline), 2019/20 (midline 1); 2022/23 (midline 2) and 2024 (endline).

Data will be collected from a variety of sources including students, parents, teachers and other stakeholders using a mix of quantitative and qualitative measures. This will include electronic data collection to measure learning outcomes at baseline, midline and endline surveys to assess the impact of the project on student learning.