Evaluation of the project “Mentors for Resilience” to contrast educational poverty

Peer-education to contrast educational poverty

Title Seconda stella a destra, questo è il cammino – MENTORI PER LA RESILIENZA

Location Arezzo, Castiglion Fiorentino, Salerno, Catania

Duration 2019-2021

Partners Oxfam Italia

Funding Social Enterprise Con I Bambini

 

Context

The project “Mentors for Resilience” was born as an experimentation of the tool of “peer education / mentoring” in curricular and extra-curricular activities. The mentoring programme is an educational strategy that aims at strengthening the learning abilities and the integration process of the most vulnerable subjects. “Peer education/mentoring” is also meant to contrast early school-dropout and educational poverty, and also to orient capacity building and actions across the whole educational community.

The project “Mentors for Resilience” is built around four main actions, that have been implemented in different ways in each province of implementation, to both adapt interventions to local specificities and to enhance the skills of local partnerships. These 4 main actions are:

  • 1) Establishment of a “learning community” at regional and interregional level.
  • 2) Direct support, involvement and expansion of the educating community
  • 3) Strengthening of the school system (training, mentoring, retraining)
  • 4) Development of cognitive, affective and expressive skills

The project involved about 5,500 minors aged 5 to 14 years old (from the last year of kindergarten, to primary and middle school, up to the first year of high-school) and their families, who were in a situation of overt educational poverty or on the brink of educational poverty.

General Objective

Mentors for Resilience is made up of a wide set of heterogeneous actions, all aimed at activating a permanent integrated supervision of subjects and contrasting educational poverty, focused on fostering peer education as a key to cohesion and leadership.
The mid-term evaluation of the project was aimed at estimating the degree of achievement of the results after the first 18 months of implementation.

Our contribution

The evaluation strategy has been developed by ARCO specifically for the project around three main moments:

  • A mid-term evaluation (carried out in the 18th month of activity), focused on the process of implementation of the activities and their preliminary results;
  • A final evaluation (carried out in the 36th month), dedicated to measuring the degree of achievement of the expected results and the mid-term objectives of the project;
  • A social impact assessment (that will be carried out one year after the conclusion of the project activities), aimed at estimating the medium-long term change generated by the project.

The objectives of the mid-term evaluation (carried out in August 2020) were re-organized in order to support the partnership in addressing the problems of reshaping the project actions after new needs emerged as a consequence of  the Covid-19 emergency and social distancing.

Data collection was carried out completely remotely, through  semi-structured individual interviews, but also via the web-conference platforms, that involved the whole team of the lead partner and some representatives of the individual partners (for a total of 13 interviews).

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