Under Mkombozi’s project "Appropriate Education for Marginalised Children" project (2004-2007), we conducted participatory action research into what makes children at risk of school exclusion and truancy. This research demonstrated the local variation in child vulnerability and, thus, the need for educational services that respond to the individual students' needs.
Mkombozi has been piloting the Primary Years Programme (PYP), which is part of the International Baccalaureate Organization (www.ibo.org), as a curriculum for street children learning at our MEMKWA centre. The PYP programme works to build inquiring and collaborative learners and is accredited as a global example of good practice. In addition to delivering this curriculum to street children in residential care and on the streets, we have also started a training programme with MEMKWA facilitators from 10 centres to enable them to deliver a more integrated and participatory approach to student learning. We now wish to build on this experience by continuing the training of MEMKWA facilitators, offering them coaching and mentoring support and continuing to advocate for the wider use of the PYP curriculum model.
Learning from the "Appropriate Education" project also revealed that there are a number of problems surrounding the implementation of the MEMKWA programme for out of school children. MEMKWA centres are under-resourced and poorly conceived; they use largely untrained para-professionals to work with children who have special educational needs. However, they have considerable potential as a locale for broader community based children's services (e.g. advice for parents, library services, IT centres).
Investment in MEMKWA at a local level is a sensible starting point in moving District budgets to looking forward to investing in wider children's services. The "good quality" education envisaged under EFA targets should not be a restrictive and rigid set of school based curricula tests, but rather something that ensures that both education and children's services meet locally relevant needs. Mkombozi has a history of engaging with local communities through a participatory action research process that creates a movement for local action. Research has shown that communities see the need to invest in children's services, but lack the capacity to articulate these needs in their local plans that are submitted to the District Council as part of the annual budget planning process.
In 2005/6, the Commonwealth Education Fund (CEF) funded Mkombozi to research, design and disseminate a popular information handbook for parents and education officials called Pata Elimu Sasa (PDF 3.2mb; available in Kiswahili only). To date, 16,000 copies have been disseminated and the information further popularized through a 6 month series of radio plays performed by children, radio phone-in programmes and murals painted at visible locations in our target communities.
The dissemination of an effectively designed publication, supported by community meetings to widen the spread of the messages, training of local education officials and use of popular media mechanisms, is a cumulative approach to popularizing policy that we wish to further. Specifically, we wish to focus on how education policy initiatives for vulnerable children are actually applied in practice with respect to local district planning and financing.
Notably, Mkombozi has been conducting outreach work (since 2001) with schools and local government leaders. This work has had a positive impact on increasing the enrolment of children in school, improving student retention, raising local awareness about what makes vulnerable children and engaging communities to initiate their own projects to address child vulnerability. We have built a productive and collaborative relationship with Moshi Municipal Council and they have requested us to work more systematically with them to enable communities to identify their needs for children’s services, cost them and navigate the budgeting and implementation hurdles, thereby ensuring that these services can become systemic in local Government operations.
Thus, now is an opportune time for Mkombozi to leverage this relationship and to use our expertise and support to catalyse local Government to address the issue of vulnerable children’s education and protection.
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