School doors reopen!

This week we have re-opened our classroom doors to all students and grade levels after nearly 10 weeks of closure. With this second COVID shutdowns now behind us, I have been reflecting on how different the two events and our responses have been.

When schools were closed 2020, we were aware of one confirmed case of COVID among any of our staff or school communities; COVID was a menacing shadow but not yet a lived reality. Each day teachers would mask up and walk or cycle to different communities to meet with individually with students. It was a far from perfect, but at most schools, teachers were able to connect with 75% or more of their students, check on their wellbeing, and keep them doing some schoolwork.

Flash forward to 2021 and COVID is no longer a distant threat. In June and July, it was not uncommon for Eastern Province to have a positivity rate of 35 or 40 percent. When the government closed schools in mid-June, the idea of sending teachers door to door was far too risky. But this left us wondering, how can we engage students if we cannot visit them? It was not possible to re-enact our 2020 outreach plan.

The Zambia Information, Communication and Technology Authority (ZITCA) estimates that roughly 80% of Zambia’s land area now has phone network access and 50.4% of rural households have a mobile phone. Given those statistics, it seemed unlikely a majority of our students and families would be contactable by phone. In May of last year, we began to collect more reliable phone numbers across all students, and we now have contact information for about 40% of Impact families.

Armed with these phone numbers, our School Support Team began to brainstorm how we could deploy a phone-based outreach. Network connection is not great in many of our communities – would we reach anyone? Who would make the calls? Will the phone numbers still work? How can we make sure calls are seen as supportive and not intrusive?

In the end, Caroline and Edward, our project leaders, settled on a pilot project in which eight School Support Officers (SSOs) would reach out to about 580 pupils who were identified as being more vulnerable during the school closure. These students fell into one of three categories:

1. Students who have previously been involved in child protection cases (assault, defilement, abuse, etc.);

2. Female students age 13 or older; or

3. Students with poor attendance during the previous term.

During each call the SSOs spoke with a parent or guardian and to the learner. They listened to the needs or challenges of the family, learned about the wellbeing and learning of the child during the school closure, linked the family to and needed resources or guidance, and encouraged the learner to return to school as soon as it reopened. Our SSOs indicated that families were “engaged and eager to share” in 75% of the phone calls which were made.

Current reports on similar phone-outreach projects in southern Africa during COVID seemed to indicate that a 40 to 60 percent contact rate for this kind of outreach project might be expected. Optimistically, we set our goal to 60% and in the end, we were ecstatic to see that we had reached 77% of our targeted student group!

I don’t think any of us believe that a 15-minute call from a school staff member is a particularly life-changing event, but these phone calls taught us a lot of things. Through these calls, the SSOs encountered families who had questions about how to help their child at home, about what they could do to keep their child motivated to attend school, and they shared insight with us about obstacles they face.

The SSOs made notes for the school support team about follow up support that would benefit each child and they shared Impact’s child protection phone number with each family. Each question and comment helped up have a clearer picture of the needs of our learners and communities. It is our hope that these 15-minute calls were one more clear way of signaling to our students and families that the education of their child is important: important to us, important to them, and important to Zambia’s future.

-Annabelle