Accessing, staying and succeeding in basic education – UK aid’s support to marginalised girls

Review

Our review into marginalised girls found that DFID has made a substantial commitment to girls and improving their life chances across its education portfolio. This included investing significantly in programmes such as the flagship Girls’ Education Challenge fund.

However it also found that too many programmes performed poorly against their original objectives losing the necessary focus on girls, particularly marginalised girls and in some cases abandoning targets for supporting girls altogether.

Reasons for the loss of focus included:

• Girls’ education objectives being displaced by competing priorities.
• A lack of influence by DFID on the focus of government-run education programmes in certain countries.
• Poor design of girls-focused interventions.
• A lack of expertise on the part of delivery partners in tackling education for marginalised girls.
• Difficulties with implementation in challenging environments.

The review also found that DFID’s approach to value for money risked creating an incentive to focus on the easiest to reach rather than those most in need, such as vulnerable girls, which was inconsistent with its commitment to ‘leave no one behind’.

Overall, we awarded DFID’s performance an ‘amber-red’ score – requiring significant improvement to ensure a clear, strategic direction, and to tackle a pattern of underperformance.

Recommendations

ICAI made a series of recommendations for improving DFID’s performance in supporting marginalised girls:

1. DFID should develop a clear strategy for supporting marginalised girls in education.
2. DFID should monitor programmes to ensure a focus on girls’ education is not lost.
3. DFID should provide guidance on value for money when targeting marginalised groups, including how to combine equity considerations with cost-effectiveness.