Evaluating project to empower 2000 scholars through school

The Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) is a pan-African non-governmental organisation working in 33 African countries to empower girls and women through gender-responsive education.

FAWE partnered with Mastercard Foundation in 2013 in a 10-year programme to support 2,000 scholars (primarily girls) in Rwanda and Ethiopia through secondary school, and to further support a group of the Rwandan scholars through university.

The principal goal of the FAWE-Mastercard Foundation Scholars Programme is to provide access to quality education at secondary- and tertiary-school level (through scholarships and the provision of resources), as well as access to the necessary academic and mentorship support to enable selected scholars to excel in this environment and transition out of school into further education and employment.

In its seventh year of implementation, FAWE appointed Genesis to conduct a mid-term review of the programme. The purpose of this review was to:

• Assess the effectiveness and efficiency of the programme’s implementation to date;
• Evaluate the extent to which the planned outcomes of the programme have been achieved; and
• Identify the successes and challenges experienced by the programme.

From the findings gathered through the mid-term review, Genesis compiled a set of recommendations for FAWE to consider to improve implementation for the remainder of the programme, highlighting components of the programme to amplify and other components to rethink.

Genesis also extracted key lessons learned that FAWE should consider for the replication and scaling of the programme in future.