The Role of the Education Sector in Providing Care &amp; Support for Orphans &amp; Vulnerable Children in Lesotho &amp; Swaziland. O?enLearning. 07
Author: Open Society Foundations (OSF), Education Support Program (ESP)
Date: 2012-00-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Children,Disadvantaged Youth,Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS),Role of Education,Program Effectiveness,Intervention,Foreign Countries,Access to Education,Equal Education,Elementary Secondary Education,Postsecondary Education,Vocational Education,Nonformal Education,Child Welfare

As the HIV epidemic continues to unfold across southern Africa, countries are still struggling to find effective means to address many of its negative impacts at individual, family and community levels. One of the most complicated challenges is how to support the growing number of orphans and other children made vulnerable, or made more vulnerable, by the direct and indirect effects of HIV on their households. In particular, there have been many individual and institutional efforts to assist these children through schools and other educational services and institutions. But there has been little research into the actual impact of most of these interventions. The Open Society Foundations Education Support Program (OSF ESP) and the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA) have been involved in some of these programmes and came to the realisation that too many interventions within the education sector have not been adequately documented nor have they been evaluated rigorously enough to be certain that they are producing positive lasting benefits for the children. So OSF ESP and OSISA agreed to fund a study of multi-sectoral efforts to assist orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) through schools in two of the countries most affected by the epidemic, Lesotho and Swaziland. In particular, the study probed in greater depth, and within the more systematic frame of a research methodology, the achievements of two current initiatives in each of country. The four cases described in this report each present an innovative approach to improving the care and support of vulnerable children within schools. Some of that support is direct and individually focussed (Lesotho Girl Guides Association and Moya Centre), while some is more indirect and focussed on strengthening systems and general community capacity (World Vision Lesotho and the Bantwana Schools Integrated Programme). While none of the profiled interventions can demonstrate cross-cutting and sustained change across the population of children they assist, each programme can provide numerous compelling examples of individuals whose lives have been transformed. In each case, there was also a clear recognition of the multi-faceted needs of vulnerable children and the need to work in partnership with others to address them -- as well as a realisation that it is vital to strengthen the overall system to transform the schools into stable and optimally functional institutions, alongside the specific interventions to assist vulnerable children. What is also evident is that the same institutional commitment and investment that has built country-level HIV and AIDS responses has not yet been mobilised to address the needs of vulnerable children, particularly with respect to guaranteeing access to education and providing optimal conditions for educational achievement. This needs to be urgently addressed because the societal impact of this gap is profound and lasting. [This study was conducted on behalf of OSISA and OSF ESP by Armstrong Associates Consulting between June 2011 and January 2012.]