June 6, 2014 Businesswomen in ASEAN Member States can now share experiences and promote a favorable environment for women’s entrepreneurship through the ASEAN Women’s Entrepreneur Network (AWEN). The ASEAN Committee on Women created AWEN and hosted a launch event on … Read More
May 2, 2012- With support from the ASEAN-U.S. Technical Assistance and Training Facility, managed by Nathan Associates, the ASEAN Commission on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Women and Children (ACWC) spent 10 days in Washington DC and … Read More
Nearly 15 years of strong growth has resulted in Zambia becoming a middle-income country. Yet levels of poverty have remained intractably high (60.5% in 2010). A major reason why growth has not resulted in greater reduction in poverty levels is … Read More
LIFT aims to improve the incomes of the rural poor in Ethiopia through improved land tenure security and addressing the constraints faced by the rural poor to access markets. The programme aims to achieve this through three components: 1 Land … Read More
US-APEC Technical Assistance to Advance Regional Integration (US-ATAARI) is a five-year activity that aims to strengthen the capacity of the APEC Secretariat and APEC’s foreign-assistance eligible developing member economies to advance regional economic integration and achieve the Bogor Goals of free and … Read More
Ghana has experienced robust growth thanks to increased oil and gas production, private sector investment, and political stability. Northern Ghana, however, has remained underdeveloped, despite the rapid growth of the country’s economy and there is an increasing need to integrate … Read More
USAID ASEAN Connectivity through Trade and Investment (US-ACTI) was a five-and-a-half-year project supporting the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) economic integration efforts from 2013 through 2018. US-ACTI supported ASEAN in the areas of customs modernization, trade and investment facilitation, … Read More
For developing countries, economic growth through increases in trade is the fastest way to reduce poverty. In the East African Community, this requires improving competitiveness of exports at national and regional level, particularly since the EAC market must operate in … Read More
Improving learning outcomes for 1 million marginalised girls
The Girl’s Education Challenge (GEC) is a global £300m DFID challenge fund to improve educational outcomes for girls by triggering and scaling up successful innovation among the private sector and NGOs. The focus for the project is not simply ensuring that the use of a challenge fund would enable more girls to have access to learning opportunities, but that girls would remain in schools for long enough to transform their social and economic opportunities.
Launched in 2012, the Girl’s Education Challenge is the largest donor-funded global girls’ education programme, funding 37 individual projects across 19 countries. Projects were selected through an open and transparent process and assessed for their ability to implement new and effective ways to get girls into school, keep them there and make sure they receive a good quality education in ways which are sustainable beyond the GEC funding.
The Girl’s Education Challenge programme is innovating payment by results for projects based on their achievements in terms of girls’ learning improvements. With this comes a rigorous approach to monitoring and evaluation to help understand the impact of different interventions on girls’ learning outcomes. Approximately 70,000 girls across 19 countries are tracked as part of this evaluation, while advanced evaluation methods such as randomized control trials and quasi-experimental research designs are used to understand the girl’s improvements in learning compared to a control group.
Nathan has played a key role in setting up the GEC fund by providing both challenge fund and education expertise, and has provided technical support for setting up the monitoring and evaluation framework. Nathan continues to play a central role in the delivery, management and further development of the GEC evaluation.… Read More
Joining hands with Sri Lanka’s coir industry, the USAID-funded Competitiveness Program managed by Nathan Associates distributed 500 coir spinning reels to village women. “When the tsunami washed away thousands of homes along Sri Lanka’s southern coast last December, hundreds of … Read More