DECEMBER 12, 2017 A BETTER LIFE FOUNDATION INTERNSHIP REPORT LEWIS PICARD Contents Table of Acronyms ................................................................................................................................. 2 I. Introduction and Summary .................................................................................................................. 3 III. Processes ........................................................................................................................................... 4 Organisational Structure ..................................................................................................................... 4 Responsibilities of Program Director and Points Focaux ................................................................... 5 Provision of Support ....................................................................................................................... 5 Monitoring and Reporting ............................................................................................................... 6 Recruiting ........................................................................................................................................ 6 Destitute Women ................................................................................................................................ 7 IV. Feedback from Partners and Special Considerations ........................................................................ 7 V. Impressions and suggested ways forward .......................................................................................... 8 Sustainability and Integration ............................................................................................................. 8 Scheduling........................................................................................................................................... 9 Recruitment Criteria .......................................................................................................................... 10 Collection and Management of Data ................................................................................................ 10 Payment methods .............................................................................................................................. 11 School Kits ........................................................................................................................................ 11 Process for visiting students .............................................................................................................. 11 Student performance and social inclusion ........................................................................................ 11 Teacher training ................................................................................................................................ 12 VI. Conclusions and Recommendations ............................................................................................... 13 Appendix A – Situation and Recommendations by Department .......................................................... 14 Ganzourgou Province ........................................................................................................................ 14 Gourma Province .............................................................................................................................. 16 Boulgou Province.............................................................................................................................. 16 Oubritenga Province ......................................................................................................................... 17 Kadiogo Province (Ouagadougou).................................................................................................... 17 Appendix B – Similar organisations ..................................................................................................... 19 1 Table of Acronyms ACRONYM MEANING DESCRIPTION CCEB Chef de Circonscription d’Education de Base Senior civil servant within the Ministry of Education for a particular department. CEB Circonscription d’Education de Base Departmental headquarters of the Ministry of Education, ultimately responsible for all students in a department. MASSN Ministère de l'Action Sociale et de la Solidarité Burkina Faso government ministry Nationale responsible for social inclusion programs. aka MFSNF Ministère de la Femme, de la Solidarité New name of MASSN, not yet Nationale et de la Famille widely used. MENA Ministère de L'Education Nationale et de Ministry of Education of Burkina l'Alphabétisation Faso. 2 I. Introduction and Summary This report represents the culmination of the author’s month-long internship with A Better Life Foundation in Burkina Faso, during which the author worked closely with the local director of the program, Alexandre Tapsoba. Over the course of the month, meetings were held with all of the points focaux (focal points) who are the organisation’s partners within government ministries in each district. These meetings were used as an opportunity to verify and update the list of students currently in the program, recruit new students, and gather information and feedback regarding A Better Life’s operations. It was also possible to individually meet over 300 of the students currently enrolled in the program and update their details and photographs. This report is structured as follows: Section I provides an overview of the internship and significant findings, Section II is a detailed discussion of the processes involved in the foundation’s intervention in Burkina Faso, Section III contains comments and feedback from A Better Life Foundation’s partners in Burkina Faso, Section IV presents a set of recommendations to the foundation and Section V concludes the report. In the 2017-2018 academic year, A Better Life Foundation will be supporting over 500 disabled students, spread across more than 200 schools in the central and eastern provinces of Burkina Faso. Support is delivered to these students through a decentralized network of points focaux within the ministries of education and social action, as well as associations of handicapped persons. The points focaux are relied upon to keep up-to-date with the circumstances of students in their department, deliver fees and school kits to parents and recommend new students to the program. The entire network is managed by the program director, who makes regular trips to all of the departments in order to deliver fees and school supplies to the points focaux, instruct them in providing documentation and receipts to the foundation and meet with new and existing students in the program. The program director further compiles the information received from all of the points focaux, and maintains a global list of all the students in the program. Overall, the partners indicated that A Better Life Foundation is a highly effective organisation, which is able to deliver significant material support to children distributed across a wide area, while relying on a small number of permanent staff supported by a robust network of partners in local government organisations. The impressions of those involved in the program, from parents to government ministers, are overwhelmingly positive. A set of recommendations is presented in section V, designed to allow the foundation to increase the ease of internal communication and data management, as well as establish systems which will cope well with growth in student numbers. The first of these recommendations is to agree upon a clear schedule for the implementation of the processes described in section III, considering the optimal ordering of tasks to save time for the country team. It is also suggested that a set of clear criteria is established for beneficiary recruitment in cases where the categorisation of a disability is ambiguous, such as for students with long-term but medically treatable ailments. Finally, it is recommended that a more sophisticated system be implemented for the management of large quantities of student data, which may require recruiting a new employee in the country office with experience in database-management and administration. 3 II. Processes Figure 1. Organisational structure of A Better Life Foundation. Blue arrows represent flows of money and supplies, orange arrows represent flows of information. MENA: Ministry of Education. MASSN: Ministry of Social Action. Organisational Structure The operations of A Better Life Foundation are dependent on a distributed network of points focaux, public servants who help ABLF deliver fees and supplies to children and parents in each of the departments in which the program operates. Every department in the country has one or more CEB (Circonscription d’Education de Base), local structures of the Ministry of Education (MENA) responsible for enrolment of students and inspection of schools in their jurisdiction. In most departments all of ABLF’s operations are coordinated with the CEB, and the point focal will be either the CCEB, who is the manager of the CEB, or a more junior employee appointed by them. 4 In some departments, existing structures are in place to promote the social inclusion of people with disabilities, in which case a point focal for the program will usually be found within this structure. These are generally part of the Ministry of Social Action (MASSN), or in the case of the city of Fada N’Gourma,