Enhancing the quality of education for vulnerable children in refugee camps

Levante was contracted by an international NGO in Jordan to conduct a baseline assessment in Marka Camp for a project to improve access to and quality of education for children attending UNRWA schools, as well as protect their physical and emotional well-being. The baseline was commissioned to establish the project’s starting points and benchmark indicator values, to form the basis of the M&E framework, and to provide recommendations and plans for integrating data collection tools and/or other required data sets necessary for monitoring and evaluation of the project.

For the data collection, Levante used a mixed-method approach that consisted of both quantitative and qualitative data collection tools. All the tools were designed using child-friendly, gender-sensitive and participatory approaches. Data was collected remotely as the baseline was conducted in the COVID-19 context using phone surveys with parents, teachers, and school attendees. The team also conducted in-person observations of schools where they inspected school infrastructure and conducted key informant interviews with headteachers and focus group discussions with teachers.

One of the major challenges that Levante encountered while conducting this baseline was an information gap occasioned by the unavailability of parent and school attendee phone numbers for the phone interviews, and the public health risk of visiting communities in-person. To counter this challenge, the team used the snowballing sampling approach to reach parents and students and conduct surveys. This was achieved by calling the reachable parents and asking them to provide numbers of other parents at the end of their surveys. At the end of the parent survey in each household, assenting parents would hand over the phone to their adolescent children for the children’s interviews – with appropriate safeguarding measures taken.

Levante’s effective data collection using child-friendly questioning allowed the team to explore young people’s own perceptions of the impact of Covid-19 of their motivation to learn, future choices in education and attainment. This analysis strengthened the evidence base for the intervention, re-enforcing some of the assumptions with the voices of children themselves. The report highlighted the impact of remote learning and isolation on learning and well-being, as well as the potential for impact of play-based learning.

Levante also helped the implementing organization develop a more nuanced understanding of what ‘positive and negative associations with school’ are composed of for children in the UNRWA camps, and how best to measure project impact going forwards.

At the end of the baseline, Levante produced an elaborate report whose recommendations included provision of capacity building for teachers on class management and recognition of the limitations that large numbers of students and inflexible curricula pose to implementing play-based methodologies. The team provided some practical recommendations to ensure a reduced burden on teachers and that the methodologies remain relevant to the children.

Additionally, the team recommended that the teachers receive training and capacity building to improve their abilities to include children with disability without causing any negative un-intended outcomes to the children. The team also provided some recommendations on the project design and implementation such as disaggregating the indicators relevant to children by gender and disability so that the needs of children within these groups are not overlooked.