Join GEF at the Fox on May 12 for a benefit concert!

About the Show

Three amazing bands from the Boulder/Denver area are coming together to help raise funds for Global Education Fund! Join Koffi Togo Vibe, Lula Granji, and the Technicolor Tone Factory for a rockin’ show that will benefit GEF’s programs in Kenya, Guatemala, and India and help to raise awareness about our work. The all-ages show will be held on Sunday, May 12th (Mothers’ Day). Tickets are $15 and doors open at 7:30pm.

Hear good music, have fun and support a great cause!

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You’ve heard the statistics, you’ve read the articles, and now you’re

wondering what you can do to educate girls and change the world.

 DATE:    April 17, 2013

TIME:     6:00 pm Reception & Panel

              7:00 pm Screening      

 VENUE: The Dairy Center for the Arts 

2590 Walnut St, Boulder, CO 

 COST:    $10/ticket (purchase tickets at http://gathr.us/screening/2522)*

 *Tickets must be purchased using the URL above.

 No tickets will be sold at the venue on the screening date.

 We must get 50 reservations for them to show the film.

 No credit cards will be charged until we reach that tipping point.

The post Girl Rising in Boulder appeared first on Global Education Fund.

1)    Find out  when a screening comes to your city of Girl Rising, a film about 9 extraordinary girls from 9 countries who showcase the strength of the human spirit and the power of education to change the world. Click here to buy your ticket to the Denver screening on April 4.

2)    Galvanize support for girls in Guatemala. Literacy rates among indigenous women and girls in Guatemala are among the lowest in the world. When a girl in a developing country receives seven or more years of education, she marries four years later and has 2.2 fewer children. Support this work with a donation to Global Education Fund.

3) Learn how girls are exploited and forced into bonded labor in India and how they can fight back. Watch this video to see Savita’s story.

4) Stand up for girls in the Young Leaders program in Kenya. They are making great strides under seemingly insurmountable odds. Read one girl’s story here.

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You’ve heard the statistics, you’ve read the articles, and now you’re

wondering what you can do to educate girls and change the world.

DATE:    April 4, 2013

TIME:     6:30pm Reception & Panel

              7:30pm Screening      

 VENUE: Denver Pavilions Stadium 15 (Screen 1)

500 16th Street #310

Denver, CO

COST:    $10/ticket (purchase tickets at http://gathr.us/screening/1166)*

*Tickets must be purchased using the URL above.

 No tickets will be sold at the theater on the screening date.

 We must get 100 reservations for Regal 9 to show the film.

 No credit cards will be charged until we reach that tipping point.

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The following commentary by Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, is insightful.

“Education has emerged as a leading theme in the campaign for Kenya’s hotly contested presidential election on March 4. The quality of education, the lack of teachers and making sure children progress to secondary school all came up in the first presidential debate on February 11.

While these important issues deserve to be addressed, there is one that goes deeper, because it keeps so many children out of school: the stark inequalities faced by large groups in Kenyan society, including pastoralists, urban slum dwellers and refugees. When the presidential candidates meet on February 25 for their second debate, they have a chance to tackle this injustice.

Kenya has made some great strides in education over the past dozen years. When the government officially abolished primary school fees, many more children were able to attend. The net enrolment ratio surged from 62% in 1999 to 83% in 2009, as we found in the 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report.

Kenya is now looking beyond primary school to universal secondary education. But primary school is still a distant dream for many children – especially girls and young women, as we highlighted on this blog a year ago. Kenya has 1 million children out of school, making it one of the 10 countries in the world with the highest numbers out of school, as we show in our fact sheet on education in Kenya. If you are from a rich household in Nairobi, your chances of getting into school are extremely high, whether you are male or female. But if you are poor and live in the pastoralist North-Eastern region, it’s a very different story, and even more so if you are female.

Of poor females living in the North Eastern region in Kenya aged 7 to 16, 44% have never been to school, according to our World Inequality Database on Education.

Some of Kenya’s lowest enrolment ratios and largest gender gaps are found in the 10 most arid districts, inhabited predominantly by pastoralists. In the 2010 EFA Global Monitoring Report, we found that net enrolment was less than 30% for boys and 20% for girls in the three worst-performing districts. Pastoralists have to move with their herds, so the government needs to find flexible and more mobile ways to meet their education needs – more urgently now than ever, as climate change forces herders to travel farther and farther in search of water.

To the government’s credit, it produced a policy framework on nomadic education after we published the 2010 EFA Global Monitoring Report. It continues to largely ignore the education rights of another large group whose needs we explored in that report, however: urban slum dwellers.

About a third of Nairobi’s population – around 1 million people – live in slums. These settlements are deemed “illegal,” so they are not recognized in government plans for schools. Household poverty, poor child health and nutrition and extensive child labour provide formidable barriers to education. Most parents in slums have to pay for poor-quality private schooling, due to the lack of government schools there, while non-slum children have access to free government education, as identified in a study by the African Population and Health Research Centre.

Refugees make up the third group in Kenya that faces huge barriers to education, as I described on this blog in 2011. Kenya is host to some of Africa’s largest refugee populations, many of whom fled from wars in Somalia and Sudan, but the government has been unable to support their education, as we outlined in the 2011 EFA Global Monitoring Report, The hidden crisis: Armed conflict and education.

When I visited the sprawling Dadaab complex of refugee camps in northeastern Kenya in 2010, refugees told me they saw schooling as a top priority because “Education is the only thing we can take home.” But their hopes and aspirations are not being met. The government needs to incorporate refugee education in its strategic planning, and put pressure on aid donors to make sufficient funds available on a multiyear basis.

Ensuring education for all means making special efforts to reach those who have been excluded in the past. Kenya’s presidential candidates have a chance to show they understand that principle – by highlighting the education barriers faced by those who most need the government’s help, especially rural girls, pastoralists, slum dwellers and refugees.”

The post Education and Elections in Kenya appeared first on Global Education Fund.

MCRC training program in India

Recently I moderated a session called “Beyond Grants: Non-Financial Ways to Support Grassroots Organizations” at the Council on Foundations conference with my colleagues John Esterle of  The Whitman Institute and Katrin Wilde of the Channel Foundation.Many new, small and growing foundations want to know “What can we do to help our grantees make the word a better place besides writing a check?’  For those that fund domestically, the recent federal and state budget crises have renewed concerns that grantees will suffer from the impacts of continued decreases in government funding. For those that fund internationally and particularly in the Global South, we know that NGO’s or non-governmental organizations as they are called abroad, need lots of support in technical assistance, training and skills and capacity building.

We all know the financial ways we can support grantees – from writing a check to strategic investments so we will not address that aspect but instead look at ways you can support grantees with what I call “value-added grantmaking”.

Foundations can play a large role in catalyzing change among grantees. In addition to accelerating social change and promoting collaborations, funders can catalyze change by convening gatherings of grantees. This can be done with a relatively small financial outlay or even none at all with a gathering such as a brown bag lunch.

One of the most important roles is community building. This can be seen in bonding and unifying the community, balancing diverse roles, and leading. Choosing trustees and staff who reflect diverse backgrounds and interests can make a big difference in the vision and strategy of the organization. Making certain that grantees are similarly reflective can help a community achieve a healthy balance. Local grantmaking committees are a tremendous way to achieve that result. Domestically, I like the Funding Exchange model, where the grantmaking committee is composed of community activists and people of wealth. This helps ensure that you are seeking out and being accessible to groups struggling at the margins but it also brings a whole new perspective of ways to work together. For instance, the power dynamic that donors bring to the table when working alongside activists and grantees must be constantly monitored and addressed.

Internationally, I think regional advisory committees are even more important. How are we as Americans going to know the real needs of a small community in a developing country? If we are to truly support what is called bottom-up development, listening to local leaders is the best practice to define the needs and the solution. We may come in with our pre-conceived notions of the situation but until we listen to the local people, we have no idea what the real needs and the most effective solutions are.

Another aspect in community building continues beyond listening to local leaders. When you listen, you can identify areas for improvement for the organization. This is where you can exercise your role as a leader by offering training and technical assistance to help groups become more successful. I was Executive Director for 8 years of a foundation in Haiti and after much discussion and reflection (often over the span of a year), we would provide training and technical assistance to the organization before a grant was ever made. Our philosophy was the grassroots organizations needed a lot of capacity building and organizational development before they embarked on a project to ensure success.  This could be something as simple as providing financial management or evaluation training, providing capacity building technical assistance to help them build up their fund development skills, or helping them increase their revenues by referring them to like-minded funders.

In our conceptualizing role, we can help grantees in analyzing the problem, defining and redefining the solutions, focusing on the important issues, and framing the story. In this respect, media and communications can play an important role. Some of the activities are free or inexpensive such as digital outreach and making introductions.

In critiquing the issues, we can support grantees with commentary with little or no cost such as writing an editorial or a blog to not only inform the public but to comment on needs not being fulfilled. We can also be the gadfly and provoke the social conscience by arranging for grantees to present on panels such as this conference where they can raise issues before an audience of stakeholders.

Another role in critiquing the issue is simply being a sounding board. This can mean listening and reflecting as grantees work through ideas or it can be availing ourselves from our perspective as a big picture viewer where grantees can pick our brains or bounce ideas off us.

Here is a short summary of the concepts:

Beyond Grants Resource List

Catalyzing – Strategic foundations can speed up social change through action strategies such as initiating, accelerating, leveraging, collaborating and partnering, and convening.

Grantee convening types include:

• Skills building
• Issue oriented: gender equity, environmental issues, etc.
• Peer exchange
• Building relationships
• Reflection and rejuvenation
• Brown bag lunch to discuss common issue

Community Building – Work locally to strengthen a community and build capacity and partnerships by unifying, balancing and leading. Tools include:

• Grantmaking committee of both local activists and donors
• Regional advisory committees who live in developing countries and understand the local needs of the region
• Skills training to strengthen the organization (ie, financial management or monitoring and evaluation)
• Technical assistance to build capacity (ie, advocacy or fund development)
• Training and TA before the grant
• Quantity or wholesale purchases when several grantees need the same materials
• Intern to conduct third party monitoring and evaluation of grantee project

Conceptualizing – Foundations can bring to the forefront new ideas that speed progress by analyzing, defining and redefining, focusing, innovating and testing. Examples include:

• Connecting grantees to media and journalists
• Introducing digital outreach and social networking
• Advising on framing the story
• Providing technical support on visual aids (flip cameras and/or videos)

Critiquing – Foundations can play a role as advocate and social conscience, ensuring that important needs are not overlooked by commenting, approving and disapproving, serving as a social conscience, and advocating. Examples include:

• Writing editorial or blog
• Arranging for grantees to participate on panels and workshops
• Listening and reflecting
• Being a sounding board
• Coaching
• Ensuring safety of activists

Many of the concepts discussed can be found in the publication “Small Can Be Effective” by Paul Ylvisaker available at the Council on Foundations Bookstore.

The post Beyond Grants appeared first on Global Education Fund.

Panelists: Katrin Wilde (Channel Fdn), Karen Ashmore (Global Education Fund), Victoria Downing (Global Fund for Children), Pamela Schifman (NoVo Fdn)

asked three audience members to act out the parts. The audience enthusiastically understood the points.

Here is the skit:
Karen: This is Skit One — before the involvement of several donors:

Mother: Anisa, time to go fetch water for the family!

Daughter: Yes mother. But I do wish I could go to school. I have to walk 5 kilometers to the river to get water and then 5 kilometers back. By the time I get home the day is almost over.

Father: You know it is the job of girls to fetch water for the family. Anyway there is no teacher. The group that built the schoolhouse did not train a teacher or provide learning materials so the building is unused.

Daughter: I know. And even if there was a school, my brothers would go instead of me.

Mother: Your future is to marry a nice man and raise a family. Why do you need to go to school for that?

Karen: And here is the scenario if several foundations supported women and girls programs:

Mother: Anisa, time to go fetch water for the family!

Daughter: Yes Mother. I am glad that we now have a well nearby. I will be back in 5 minutes with the water, then I am off to school.

Father: Yes the new teacher is doing an even better job since she went through the teacher training.

Daughter: And I am learning a lot from the books and learning materials we have in our classroom.

Mother: I like the fact that there are separate latrines for boys and girls at the school. Oh by the way, I learned in the mother’s class about ways to start a small business. I have some ideas. Maybe you can help me.

Daughter: OK. But remember, after school I am going to the girls program. Some of the boys still don’t like the fact that girls are going to school now and said they are going to put us in our place. We are going to discuss with our mentors ways we can protect ourselves and stand up for our rights.

Mother: Ok but be careful!

Mother and Father: Bye!

Karen: So you see, everything from teacher training, learning materials, wells, latrines, micro-enterprise training, parental support, girls empowerment programs and safety are all different approaches to support women and girls internationally. But there is no panacea and we must remain vigilant about new problems that surface. The concepts presented in this skit are excellent cornerstones for successful programs for women and girls in developing countries.

The post Global Programs for Women and Girls appeared first on Global Education Fund.

Initially young children living in poverty with few options, these students are now earning a quality education and have bright futures, thanks to you!

Eliada has improved her literacy skills and has high aspirations in Guatemala. Scholasticah is earning her high school diploma and has plans for college in Kenya. Mahadev left the hard life of a child laborer and is flourishing in school in India.

We depend on you to help sustain and bolster education and leadership programs for young people in Kenya, India and Guatemala. If you’re able, please donate  to Global Education Fund today and make a difference in the life of a child through education.

Wishing you a restful, happy and healthy New Year!

The post Happy New Year! appeared first on Global Education Fund.

Initially a refugee with few options, Alycia earned a quality education and learned leadership and critical thinking skills in Kenya, thanks to Global Education Fund. She is now attending a prestigious women’s college and has a bright future.

We depend on you to help sustain and bolster education and leadership programs for young people in Kenya, India and Guatemala. If you’re able, please donate to Global Education Fund today and make a difference in the life of a child through education.

Wishing you a restful, happy and healthy New Year,

The post There’s Still Time to Make a Difference in 2012 appeared first on Global Education Fund.

This year’s end of year meeting was held on 24 November at the Global Education Fund (GEF) Kenya office in Tena.  Students, parents, teachers and staff celebrated the achievements of students in the Young Leaders program.  Also in attendance was the Principal of St. Matthew High School, one of the schools that educates Young Leaders.  About 19 parents and 24 students turned up for the meeting.  Students celebrate achievements in Kenya with support of family, teachers and staff!

The purpose of the meeting was to create a forum for parents, teachers and scholars to meet and take stock of the year’s activities.  It was also an opportunity for the GEF Kenya family to meet the new executive director, Noni Mumba.  The meeting was also an opportunity to congratulate form fours, for successfully sitting for the national examinations and completing high school.  A parent opened the meeting with a word of prayer, and then Noni made welcoming remarks.  An Entertainer by the name of Fadhili was at hand to keep the day lively with music.

Parents were not left behind in entertainment; with one mother belting out a wonderful song, which we all appreciated.   This proved that music was for all ages and not only the youth.

Students were also given a chance to perform and even give speeches.  One could not fail to see the pride and joy in the parent’s faces.

A guest speaker named Lawrence also took to the stage, and gave an encouraging account as a child who came from a disadvantaged background, who has made it in life.  Lawrence encouraged us as form four leavers that we must now work even harder, as life will not stop getting more challenging.  He was keen to explain that even if one did not do well, they can still work hard, just like he did.  He did not perform well in form four, but still worked hard, did odd jobs, and eventually got a diploma certificate.  He is now studying a degree course at Nairobi University.

Our highlight was the cake cutting session for appreciating Suzzane, who is moving on to an other journey!  Wow, what an event!  We were all excited, but at the same time very sad, as we had grown very fond of Suzanne, who also seemed to love us very much.  Margaret, one of the scholars, and Grace, GEF Kenya office manager, assisted Suzzane in cutting the cake, and then we all got a share of the great tasting cake!  It was awesome!

The final session was speeches and presentation of certificates to form fours.  First was a parent who thanked GEF for the support they are giving their children.  She urged other parents to be supportive to the students and cooperate with GEF.  Next was the Principal of St. Matthew, Mr. Phillip Etende, who spoke about how empowerment through the GEF programs has set students in his school apart.  They are better behaved, and one can note that there is a positive difference from the rest of the students.  He urged GEF Kenya to continue with the good work.  Finally, Reuben one of the form four students gave the closing remarks.  He encouraged those that are yet to get to form four that they can make it all the way.  He also encouraged all those who finished their exams to keep busy, and stay away from friends who will destroy them.  He also thanked GEF for the exposure trips, retreats, and all sessions that have improved their lives and prepared them for the future.

After that Noni explained some of the rules that will be applied to scholarships and grants for college studies.  She also informed the students that the African Leadership Academy was accepting applications, and those that wanted to apply should see her.  She encouraged all parents to give a hand towards encouraging the students to do their best.

An important event had to take place, this was issuing out of certificates to the form four graduates of this year 2012.

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