Review of Save the Children Norway’s support to prevent and respond to violence in and around schools

Background

SCN has, with the funding from Norad and Operasjon Dagsverk, designed and supported the implementation of projects and interventions to address violence in schools in 17 countries. SCN addresses violence in and around schools through a) projects specifically aimed at addressing violence in schools, and b) as part of programs implemented by Save the Children (SC) offices in selected countries

Purpose/objective

The main purpose of the review is internal learning for Save the Children. The main objectives include;

1. Get an overview of what SCN is doing.
2. Find out what works and why, and
3. Highlight lessons learned, identify success criteria and provide recommendations on how to improve SCN’s future programming in this area.

Methodology

This review is based on a desk review of documentation on the programs implemented in 17 SC offices supported by Operasjon Dagsverk and Norad, first-hand information from Skype interviews with 10 of these SC offices and three in-depth studies where the Team made observations and interviewed beneficiaries and SC staff in Guatemala, Malawi and Uganda.

Key findings

The Team’s analysis has shown that the interventions are relevant to the target group, to governments/state institutions in the countries and to SCN, SCI and the donors. Local and regional government authorities are often direct partners and in six of the 13 countries analysed local or district government authorities approached SC requesting additional support, sharing of tools or expertise to be shared.  

The Team’s findings from the in-depth case studies indicate that all stakeholders have experienced a reduction violence in and around schools as a result of SC’ interventions. Children/youth are more self-confident, teachers have tools to use to when interacting with children and violence has been decreased. The cooperation between government actors and SC has also resulted in the establishment of new and important structures for communicating and of referring cases of abuse. Psychosocial support to help children, teachers and school staff who are traumatized or with conflict management is one component that has not been implemented widely but appears never-the-less to have been very important to the school atmosphere as well as to individuals.   

There is, however, a strong dependence on SC to plan, arrange and manage projects which affects the sustainability of the projects. Stakeholders rely on SC and thus do not own the process of strengthening the local child protection system.   

Few interventions are planned with the intention to address violence in schools but form part of education or child protection programs. There is thus limited measurement of progress against specific indicators to reduce violence in schools, instead the QLE is used by most of the countries interviewed.

Recommendations

SCN is recommended to, when designing an intervention addressing violence in schools:

• Involve both child protection, education and CRG staff in the SC office in order to, as much as possible, design an integrated program drawing on the expertise from all three departments when implementing a program.
• Remember that interventions to change behaviour regarding violence against children require intensive training, monitoring, coaching and follow-up efforts. SCN should consider such specific interventions on a smaller scale, in order to avoid “spreading too thin”.
• Include efforts to build and strengthen the local authorities aiming that they take ownership of interventions and responsibility for protecting children against violence in schools in the medium to long term.
• Include efforts to build and strengthen the local CSO/CBOs aiming that they advocate for change, act as watchdogs and help the community ensure duty bearers are performing.
• Dependence on SC to manage, organize and fund interventions disempowers both local authority structures and local CSOs/CBOs. A stronger capacity-building-of partners (both CSOs and local/national authorities) components is necessary to improve the sustainability.  

When establishing outcomes for interventions to address violence in schools, SCN is recommended to

• Consider the Theory of Change and assumptions underlying the expected causal links leading from input, activity, output and outcome. The underlying assumptions should build on the local context and problems identified that need to be solved in order to reduce violence in the schools.
• Address violence by many actors (parents, teachers, children and community) concurrently is important in achieving positive results 
• Involve children and the community in program design and thereby understand the underlying factors to why violence in the schools occur.  

SCN is recommended to, while implementing and monitoring intervention addressing violence in schools:

• Establish and use indicators to help measure the effectiveness of the violence in schools intervention specifically in order to be able to assess progress and change direction if needed.
• Also train teachers in how to identify traumatized youth or youth with problems and learning how to address these individuals.

Comments from the organisation

Save the Children Norway has developed a management response and action plan based on the recommendations of the review.