Founded in 1945, CARE International is a globally present NGO working to alleviate poverty in over 102 countries around the world.  With a special focus on women’s empowerment, CARE has a broad range of development programming which includes education and adolescent empowerment, health and nutrition, food security and climate justice, economic opportunity, and humanitarian response.

CARE’s work reaches over 100 million people through 1,495 community-based projects that fight the root causes of poverty. From working to get more girls into school to fighting child marriage, building resilient agriculture, empowering women by diversifying livelihoods, and closing the gender gap in the global workforce, CARE’s efforts to achieve an inclusive and just future is encapsulated in their 2030 Vision, adhering to a framework of Sustainable Development Goals and exemplified by their ongoing work across the world.

To highlight CARE’s work in the education sector, showcasing their programs and successes in the field, we spoke with Amanda Moll, CARE’s Senior Advisor for Adolescent Programing, within the Education & Adolescent Empowerment Team.

1. How have the Educate Your Children II / Waxbar Carurtaada II and Somali Girls’ Education Programme – Transition (SOMGEP-T) initiatives achieved their project objectives of reducing the gender gap in Somali schools, providing quality education, facilitating learning materials and increasing transition rates?

Somalia is actually one of the countries where we have our largest portfolios, when you look at CARE’s work in education across different countries. We feel very fortunate to both have great donors and partners supporting our work.

Interventions that we’ve done under these projects that have helped us to improve educational provision include enrolment campaigns focusing on girls’ education to make sure we’re getting more children, particularly girls, enrolled in school.  We’ve also reduced the gender gap among new students enrolling in schools, so that almost 50% of them are girls. This is something that we’ve worked toward a lot; if you look back five, ten, twenty years ago – it’s quite a shift that we’ve been able to see, and so that’s something that we’re really proud of.

Additionally, any new teacher training we do includes female teachers. Our work with Community Education Committees has also enhanced their awareness fo how having female teachers in classroom has a positive impact on girls. It has also increased the Committees’ allocations of local funds to pay for female teacher salaries. Over time, we hope to increase the percentage of new teachers that are female and ensure that they see it as a quality career path where they’re supported, both by the training program and the teaching profession.

Read the full article about CARE by Aneesh Chatterjee at Global Washington.