Camfed Learner Guides

Young women in rural Africa multiply the returns on their education by

volunteering in local, underserved schools helping students succeed.

The Sustainable Development Goals underline the importance of investing in quality secondary education, and ensuring that young people have the necessary foundation, including a broader set of life skills, to transition to productive, fulfilling livelihoods. Nowhere is this more important than in rural Africa, where the youth population is increasing faster than anywhere in the world, and formal employment opportunities are scarce.

Camfed’s Learner Guide Program responds to this challenge across Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Zambia and Ghana. It provides a scalable, sustainable model that simultaneously tackles the quality of education and opens up opportunities for young women in the post-secondary transition.

Through the program, young women who were from impoverished backgrounds and who were supported by Camfed to complete secondary school return to their local schools, support marginalized children in their studies, and deliver a tailored life skills program to complement, but not replace, the formal academic curriculum. United by their background of rural poverty, Learner Guides are important role models and mentors. They empathize with marginalized students and help them navigate their challenges. In return for their commitment, Learner Guides access interest-free loans to start small businesses, and through their training and service gain valuable experience that can be used as a stepping stone to formal teacher training or formal employment.

To date, 5,426 young women trained as Learner Guides have so far reached over 300,000 secondary school children at 1,600 schools. Learner Guides have contributed to holistic education support programs in Tanzania and Zimbabwe that are associated with statistically significant evidence of increased retention rates and learning outcomes for girls and boys, especially for marginalized girls from highly disadvantaged communities. It provides a model of excellence for young women to multiply the returns of their education to benefit the next generation. It opens up new pathways for them as entrepreneurs and teachers, and new job opportunities based on their status within communities, acquiring economic independence while helping particularly marginalized girls to succeed.

 The result is a virtuous cycle of development, through which the investment in girls’ education pays ever-increasing dividends in young women’s activism, in turn raising girls’ educational aspirations and success.

The solution simultaneously addresses two major needs in rural Africa: 

1. the need to improve the education environment holistically at underserved, rural schools, suffering from a shortage of trained teachers and resources.

2. the need to  bolster their social capital of young people who are transitioning from school, helping them develop experience and skills  in environments where there are few opportunities for formal employment.

Mobile phone technology used by Learner Guides is important:

•  for tracking outputs and outcomes of the program, 
• to enable Learner Guides to reach out for supervisory and peer support (by voice or chat groups)
•  for training and ongoing learning through mobile phone based teaching tools (such as instructional videos).

Camfed is exploring how its Learner Guide intervention can be replicated and scaled more broadly within national school systems in Tanzania. Camfed has recently secured a grant to replicate this program to five new regions in Tanzania bringing the total number of districts in which it operates in Tanzania to 18. This provides an opportunity to test the replicable potential of this program beyond Camfed’s existing infrastructure, and to explore the implications for wider national adaptation, adoption, and scale. 

 Ultimately the Learner Guide model will be adapted so that young, educated volunteers can gain valuable work experience as they contribute in nationally-supported programs to improve education at any level, with potential to be adapted for the health sector as well. Over the next three to five years, we will partner with researchers to produce:

• Evidence for a policymaker audience showing that the model can be adapted and scaled, and demonstrating why experimenting with alternative pathways to teaching for young people is important;

• An actionable plan for how that can be achieved including costings and tools.

When funding is secured to implement the Learner Guide Program, Camfed works through established partnerships with government schools in partner districts. Ministries of Educations at national and local levels are informed of the project. They determine whether to make the the life skills curriculum delivered by Learner Guides available to students by integrating it into the standard curriculum (as in Tanzania) or by offering it as an after-school program for students. 

Currently, Camfed supports 1,725 Learner Guides. Each Learner Guide reaches 15-20 students (approximately 34,500 girls and boys).  Learner Guides are young women, usually 18-28 years of age who have received a secondary school education and are living in rural areas. They are provided with extensive initial and review training. In return for their commitment to spend at least three hours per week at a local school they are linked to an interest-free loan through Kiva. They can also earn a vocational credential called a BTEC. Through their volunteer work they gain experience, skills, and social capital within their communities.

We anticipate that the within the next 12 months, we will be adding approximately 400-800 new Learner Guides (depending on availability of funding). Those Learner Guides will be reaching up to 16,000 secondary school students. Based upon a longitudinal, comparative evaluation administered in Zimbabwe and Tanzania, we expect that the marginalized, girl students will stay in school at higher rates and develop high levels of academic confidence compared to peers that were not reached by Learner Guides. Learner Guide surveys suggest that the majority will be earning incomes through small businesses and 10-15% will access further education or formal employment.

Camfed has 25 years of experience working in secondary schools schools  in rural sub-Saharan African. Our skills in building local partnerships is evident in our extensive network of over 1500 partners schools. Through the trust we have developed at local levels, we are able to co-develop innovations with local experts and test them at scale. Our proven track record at delivering programs that keep girls in school and enable them to thrive academically helps us to attract funding.

As a non-profit organization, Camfed's revenue comes from donations from a large base of individual donors, and through grants and prizes from foundations, trusts, and bilateral and multilateral donors. The CAMA alumnae network of young women is increasingly stepping up its philanthropy to support the next generations of children through school.

We are interested in developing new partnerships to develop new technologies and to share ideas for best practices among other implementers for scaling . 

Mobile phone based technologies for support communications and training tools could help the Learner Guide program improve both the quality of support we can provide to Learner Guides, and the cost effectiveness of training to reduce program costs.

Most of the young women serving as Learner Guides have mobile phones, but internet access is a barrier for them both in terms of cost and availability.  Partnerships to enhance access and/or mobile phone tools that are designed to work around those barriers could help the program tremendously.