Donor: Education Support Program, Open Society Foundation
Duration: December 2010 – September 2011
The relationship between the third and the public sectors has been undergoing fundamental changes over the last decade. The public sector has increasingly retreated from the role of direct service provider, and, through the mechanisms of competitive tendering, public-private partnership schemes and interventions has been outsourcing provision responsibilities to CSOs.
These change the nature of the responsibility of CSO interventions, and lead to a fundamental transformation of the opportunities and risks for education CSO’s. Thus, the projects of education CSOs are not only an instrument of social experimentation and innovation, but part of the general understanding of what works and why. This becomes of utmost importance when one considers the complexity linked to fostering equal educational opportunity in the context of the classroom and school. Therefore, the development of information collecting protocols and strategies by education CSOs is a necessity to foster organisational capacities to better understand the outcomes and impact of their education service interventions on beneficiary groups.
The initiative is a research strategy capacity development undertaking. It adopts the use of practice based learning and test based instrument development to develop information gathering protocols and strategies for CSOs to improve the extent to which educational interventions are validated sources of systematic social data
