Community Action for Girls' Education

Community Action for Girls' Education Project Brief (111kb)

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The Community Action for Girls' Education (CAGE) initiative is a two-year pilot project designed to facilitate community-based activities in support of girls' education and to raise the participation of rural girls in Benin by eliminating or diminishing obstacles to their successful schooling that occur outside of the school and classroom. CAGE builds upon World Learning's experience in the areas of educational equity for girls and other disadvantaged groups and community participation in primary schooling from projects it has operated successfully in Ethiopia, Guatemala, Cambodia and Uganda. It also builds upon World Learning's experience in broader civil society, community participation and NGO capacity building efforts accumulated over more than 20 years of work in international development.

The aim of the CAGE initiative is to help communities and parents identify social, cultural, economic, practical and other barriers to girls' schooling that exist in the community and household. With this in sight, CAGE will assist parents to articulate, plan, implement, and assess specific strategies to address these barriers and propose individualized projects that meet the communities' needs and interests. As a way of empowering communities to assume greater involvement in schooling for girls, World Learning works through three local NGOs to train field agents operating in 90 communities divided across the North, South, and middle of the country.

Through their own efforts and with the assistance of World Learning and its local NGO partners, communities will develop and submit proposals for small grants to fund their initiatives. Communities will then implement their projects, providing a one-to-one match to the funds they receive. At the end of the activity, citizens will have learned to organize around local issues, and will have successfully implemented a variety of education projects. Also, the three Benin NGOs with which World Learning will work - Groupe de Recherche et d'Action Pour la Promotion de l'Agriculture et du Développement (GRAPAD); Centre de Recherche et d'Action pour le Bien-Etre et la Sauvegarde de l'Environnement (CERABE); and Mutuelle des Jeunes Chrétiens pour le Développement (MJCD) - will have developed their own capacity to administer large, complex projects funded by international donors.

Partners:
USAID
Local NGOs

Project:
Cooperative Agreement, 2001-2003 Benin

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