We started engaging in using the basic technology of radio.... It's actually modelled after farm radio, which started in Saskatchewan in the 1950s. We looked at areas where children were having difficulty accessing school and where a lot of girls—particularly in the eastern Congo—were being held back from school because of high rates of sexual and gender-based violence.
Families were not allowing their girls to go to school because they became very concerned that they would be attacked along the way. That presented a number of issues for those girls in terms of their access to education, as well as the increased likelihood that they would then find themselves in early or forced marriages because they were considered to be a burden on the family and not actually physically in school.
With initial seed funding from The Wellspring Foundation, we looked at using radio as a technology. In conjunction with a lot of Congolese actors and various other teachers and personalities, we recorded these radio-based educational sessions. We deployed teaching assistants to those communities, so where the girls couldn't go to school, school then came to them. It wasn't limited only to girls' participation because if you're deploying a teaching aide to a community and piping in the lesson, you want all children who need to be able to access school to be able to use those lessons.
We started at the secondary school level, and we found that within 18 months we had higher matriculation rates—so, higher graduation rates at the appropriate grade level—than the national average. We were seeing about 85% to 90% of girls who were then successful as a result of that. That was the pilot program. It involved a few thousand kids.
Then more recently, with support from the Government of Canada through GAC, we have been able to expand that to focus, in conjunction with the Congolese government, not only on areas that are now affected by violence, where kids were being held back from school, but on where kids were not able to because of [Technical difficulty—Editor] restrictions. We're about [Technical difficulty—Editor] into that now, and we're seeing some very good results.
There are a few constraints. Obviously, now we can no longer deploy, or it's a bit more complicated for us to deploy, the teaching assistants because of public health measures that need to be in place. However, where we're not able to accomplish that, we've offset it through other means—for example, by having access through telephone and that kind of thing.
We're seeing extremely good results. We're also working in Uganda to implement a very similar kind of program.
What makes it unique is not just that it's easy for kids to access; it's also that it's at a higher level of education that goes beyond primary but includes secondary.
As for the hygiene kits, this continues to happen. We're using that a lot and making sure that families have access to what they need, whether it's soap or other essential supplies, in places like Sudan, South Sudan and elsewhere.