DRC Girls Learning and Empowerment Project

active

The project will be implemented over a five-year period using an investment project financing (IPF) modality with performance-based conditions (PBCs). In order to empower girls through education where the challenges are particularly extensive, to benefit from synergies from complementary Bank-financed operations, and to facilitate the transition to secondary education in provinces where the Bank has been supporting the Government’s free primary education policy, the project will operate in the ten CPF focus provinces, with a core focus on five provinces where girls’ net secondary enrollment rates are the lowest. The project will put in place the basic elements (currently missing in secondary education) to create an effective learning environment and promote knowledge, skills and behavior changes needed to make teaching more effective and schools safe, inclusive and free of SEA/SH, and to provide sexual reproductive health (SRH) and menstrual health management (MHM) education in secondary school classrooms and through extracurricular activities. The project is designed to address the four factors that impact learning - learners, school inputs, teachers and school management – using three complementary strategies: assessing learning, acting on evidence to make schools work for all learners, and aligning actors to make the whole system work for learning. It will bring learners to the system by breaking down physical, financial and cultural barriers to access, particularly for girls, through the building of girl-friendly infrastructure, providing scholarships to girls, incentivizing the recruitment of female teachers, and making schools safe and inclusive. It will supply critical learning inputs, including textbooks and digital teaching-learning resources. It will make teaching more effective by attracting strong candidates, both by strengthening pre-service teacher training and supporting merit-based recruitment; and by supporting the system for continuous professional development as well as school management to provide repeated and tailored training and coaching to teachers on techniques that are known to work. The project will also support building the systems to measure teaching-learning practices and learning outcomes, so as to regularly generate practice and learning metrics to guide action. All interventions are evidence-based and designed so as to align actors throughout the system in support of learning and girls’ empowerment. For example, textbooks and digital resources will be based upon newly revised curricula, supplied alongside structured lesson plans, and combined with training on how to use them effectively; the systems for pre- and in-service teacher training will be better integrated around aligned curricula, shared pedagogical approaches, and more opportunities to exchange with one another; and the promotion of girls’ education and agency will be integrated into curricula, teaching-learning materials, teacher training and the management of schools. The project will include cross-cutting interventions through different components, such as leveraging technology to strengthen the implementation and monitoring of project activities, to promote citizen engagement, and to support teaching and learning processes at the school level; adopting a multidimensional approach to closing the gender gap; and being inclusive of children with disabilities through capital investments in rehabilitation and construction, and soft interventions, such as teacher training and strengthened curricula.