Impact(Ed) International
Location
Kenya
Sector
Basic Education
Type of Investment
Grant
Project Stage
Test & Transition
Length of Investment
2022+
Website
Investment Overview
Impact(Ed) International’s flagship ‘edu-tainment’ series, My Better World, follows six African teens as they navigate the complex challenges of school, family, and friendship. Episode themes include early marriage, female genital mutilation, and sexual harassment. They also address skills and attitudes such as communication, negotiation, and resilience. The series is a unique tool included in Impact(Ed)’s life skills education and mentorship model, delivered to school children aged between 10 and 15, which includes engagement of boys, parents, and communities to enable an environment for girls to exercise agency and develop the skills that they need to succeed in school and in life.
The Development Challenge
Women and girls in the developing world face severe limitations on their ability to exercise agency in important life domains, including the pursuit of education, choice of work, and decisions of when to marry and have children. Life skills are critical to helping girls navigate such challenges as they transition into adulthood, and their acquisition and application can be particularly impactful during adolescence - a time where differences between young men and women become more pronounced and girls’ lives more defined by gender norms, practices, expectations, and shrinking opportunities.
While there is a consensus on the importance of life skills education, there is less consensus on how to design, deliver, and measure effective and empowering life skills education. Despite this lack of consensus, two commonly acknowledged shortcomings across life skills interventions are: (1) scale and sustainability, as most interventions remain small, donor funded, and time-bound, and (2) lack of attention to social change to create the enabling environment required for girls to exercise their agency outside the classroom.
The Innovation
Impact(Ed) aims to improve girls' self-efficacy, agency, and wellbeing by putting a flagship ‘edu-tainment’ series, My Better World, at the heart of a school-based life skills education and mentorship model, alongside complementary parent and community engagement. Impact(Ed)’s award-winning animated life skills series follows six African teens as they navigate the complex challenges of school, family, and friendship. Episode themes include early marriage, female genital mutilation, and sexual harassment, and address important skills and attitudes such as communication, negotiation, and resilience. These topics align well with Kenya’s competency-based curriculum and the Ministry of Education’s Mentorship Policy.
So far, Impact(Ed)’s programmes have reached over 305,000 children across 514 schools across Kenya. Through co-implementation with the government, Impact(Ed) will deliver the model to a further estimated 55,000 students across 110 schools over the next two years. This will include: (1) training of teacher-mentors to convene in-school clubs for girls and boys that foster girls’ self-efficacy and aspirations as well as boys’ allyship, (2) engagement of parents, community, and school leaders through a community action planning process and community screenings to create an enabling environment in support of girls’ agency, and (3) mass media broadcasting of My Better World via the government’s Edu-Channel to support wider norms shifts and help with home learning.
Our Investment
Impact(Ed) will use GIF's investment of $2 million to:
• Establish a standardised, well-documented innovation package that is impactful and feasible using government infrastructure for delivery, and cost-effective for the government to implement; and
• Seek to integrate this model in government policy implementation in Kenya.
Theory of Change
The underlying theory of change assumes that with Impact(ED)’s full package intervention, project activities and outputs will lead to the following intermediate outcomes for children: access to quality mentorship, a more enabling school, community, and home environment for girls, and girls with skills and attitudes for success at school and in life. Together, these will lead to impact outcomes of increased girls’ self-efficacy, and improved educational aspirations. In the longer run, the theory of change posits that these outcomes will contribute to increased agency, educational attainment, and improved life opportunities for girls. The theory of change is grounded in a gender-transformative approach that directly tackles gender and social inequalities such as unequal division of labour, child labour, gender-based violence, and early marriage based on learning from Impact(Ed)’s MBW-based interventions to date.
Why we invested
Generate learning on a public sector pathway to scale for a gender equality innovation in Africa.
Build on Impact(Ed)’s 15 years of partnership with the Government of Kenya to leverage an exciting, live policy opportunity.
A more holistic approach to tackling gender norms that engages boys, parents, and the wider community.
Promising evidence on the impact of Impact(Ed)’s model on girls’ outcomes.
Strong, local implementation team with long-term experience working on variations of this programme in Kenya, supported by global functions with deep expertise on gender equality and content development.
Strategic fit for GIF’s Innovating for Gender Equality Sub-Fund, since there is a chance for complementing and harnessing cross-learning opportunities with other grants, namely Breakthrough and MTV Staying Alive Foundation.
Advances UN Sustainable Development Goals 4 (Quality Education) and 5 (Gender Equality).
Impact(Ed) International in numbers
Children across Kenya reached
GIF grant
Schools across Kenya benefited to date
Innovating for Gender Equality
Impact(Ed) International’s flagship ‘edu-tainment’ series, My Better World, follows six African teens as they navigate the complex challenges of school, family, and friendship. It is a unique tool included in Impact(Ed)’s life skills education and mentorship model, delivered to school children aged 10-15, which includes engagement of boys, parents and communities to enable an environment for girls to exercise agency and develop the skills they need to succeed in school and in life. With GIF's grant of $2 million, a standardised, well-documented innovation package that is impactful, feasible using government infrastructure for delivery and cost-effective for the government to implement will be established. Under the grant, Impact(Ed) will seek to integrate this model in government policy implementation in Kenya.