FAWE has partnered with the Centre for Commonwealth Education (CCE) of the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education on a gender research project focusing on the positive factors that keep girls from underprivileged backgrounds in school throughout the cycle and enable them to obtain a quality education.
The research will document the experiences of girls who stay in school and examine progression through the final years of primary school when dropout is highest. It will also investigate the paths taken by academically successful women and the impact of those who have been role models or mentors to these women.
The project seeks to document the personal histories of these girls and women, analyse the impact of positive factors on their achievement, and track their progress through time.
The pilot project is scheduled to run in Kenya and Uganda from September 2009 to June 2010 and is the first step in a wider project that will cover much of East Africa from 2010.
Given the positive results of FAWE’s Centres of Excellence (COE) on girls’ education noted over time, FAWE’s AIC Kajiado COE has been selected as one of the four research sites in Kenya.
FAWE will also identify professional and university-level women who have been beneficiaries of its interventions as subjects for the research on role models and mentors.