3 Innovative FID solutions for access to quality education

According to UNICEF, 250 million children worldwide are not enrolled in school, including 129 million girls. However, education is a fundamental right enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child at the heart of FID's mission. Through its initiatives, FID is committed to ensure every child has access to quality education.

Among the 90 projects selected by FID to date, 18 focus on education, representing 23.5% of the portfolio. FID stands out for supporting diverse, scalable innovations in the education sector. Below, discover three impactful projects in India, Morocco, and Madagascar, demonstrating this diversity.

In India, mental health challenges among youth significantly affect their emotional well-being and academic performance (Currie & Stabile, 2007). Children from underprivileged areas often face domestic challenges that hinder concentration and learning potential.

To address this, the Labhya Foundation has developed an intervention in collaboration with psychologists and education experts. It combines guided meditation sessions and group activities, such as storytelling and thematic discussions, to foster a safe space for students to share their experiences.

Thanks to FID funding, the foundation collaborated with researchers to evaluate the program's impact in public schools in Tripura, northeast India. From November 2023 to October 2024, the initiative reached over 29,000 students in 100 schools. Preliminary findings show a positive impact, especially in mathematics among girls and students facing significant mental health challenges.

The Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) program is a tutoring program that groups students according to their learning levels rather than their age or grades. This approach promotes active participation and collaboration in learning sessions. TaRL has been successfully implemented in different international contexts, notably in India, Madagascar, and Ghana, where it has delivered significant and positive results in student outcomes.

In this context, the Moroccan Ministry of Education, Preschool, and Sports, alongside the National Initiative for Human Development (INDH), have mandated a consortium of Moroccan actors, led by the Sanady Foundation, to carry out a comparative evaluation of two education programs in order to generalize the most effective approach in terms of cost and learning outcomes. This “Transformation of public policies” grant assesses a traditional tutoring program in French and mathematics (Sanady Program) against the TaRL program.

The evaluation’s results will guide public authorities in adopting the most suitable program to provide basic academic skills to struggling students. This initiative also aims to empower other local organizations to adopt and scale the chosen approach.

In the Amoron’i Mania region, a lack of menstrual hygiene knowledge and a low number of water rooms and facilities negatively impacts students, particularly girls. Cultural taboos around menstruation, often perpetuated in adolescents’ households, penalizes well-being and learning conditions of young girls, who are exposed to criticism, leading to absenteeism and diminished academic performance. The Kilonga program addresses this issue through two key components to improve basic hygiene and reduce the taboos surrounding menstruation among adolescents. The project includes the construction of water and sanitation facilities, distribution of hygienic protection, or teacher training, as well as a program called “Young Girl Leaders” that selects schoolgirls from each school to become ambassadors and educate peers about menstrual hygiene.

The results of the program impact evaluation demonstrated the importance of basic hygiene and menstrual hygiene awareness to improve quality education. Girls who benefited from the intervention saw their school results increase by an average of 13%, thus improving their chances of reaching a higher grade-level by 15%.