Improving learning outcomes for 1 million marginalised girls
The Girl’s Education Challenge (GEC) is a global £300m DFID challenge fund to improve educational outcomes for girls by triggering and scaling up successful innovation among the private sector and NGOs. The focus for the project is not simply ensuring that the use of a challenge fund would enable more girls to have access to learning opportunities, but that girls would remain in schools for long enough to transform their social and economic opportunities.
Launched in 2012, the Girl’s Education Challenge is the largest donor-funded global girls’ education programme, funding 37 individual projects across 19 countries. Projects were selected through an open and transparent process and assessed for their ability to implement new and effective ways to get girls into school, keep them there and make sure they receive a good quality education in ways which are sustainable beyond the GEC funding.
The Girl’s Education Challenge programme is innovating payment by results for projects based on their achievements in terms of girls’ learning improvements. With this comes a rigorous approach to monitoring and evaluation to help understand the impact of different interventions on girls’ learning outcomes. Approximately 70,000 girls across 19 countries are tracked as part of this evaluation, while advanced evaluation methods such as randomized control trials and quasi-experimental research designs are used to understand the girl’s improvements in learning compared to a control group.
Nathan has played a key role in setting up the GEC fund by providing both challenge fund and education expertise, and has provided technical support for setting up the monitoring and evaluation framework. Nathan continues to play a central role in the delivery, management and further development of the GEC evaluation.… Read More