As part of the current strategic plan, Camara Education conducts an annual M&E exercise in order to assess the relevance, effectiveness, and impact of activities it carries out.
The main purpose of the M&E exercise is to provide accurate information on the educational impact of Camara’s activities. Through Monitoring and Evaluation, Camara is able to measure the progress made in the performance of the Camara Hubs and the changes in satisfaction level of school leaders, teachers and students in relation to Camara provided ICT equipment, training and support.
This year, the M&E exercise was conducted in schools that received Camara ICT equipment and training in 2014. In the process, 86 school management representatives, 260 teachers and 1,513 students were interviewed from partner schools in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia. The schools were selected based on criteria including location (urban, peri-urban, and rural), the level of school (primary, secondary), ownership type (Government, private, etc.), and gender of students taught (female, male or mixed).
The data gathered include perceptions on the performance of Camara hubs, the overall satisfaction levels of school leaders, the utilisation of the ICT resources for teaching, and the effects students feel the computers have on their learning, amongst other indicators.
Partner Satisfaction
This section focus on the reported levels of satisfaction amongst Camara’s education partners, and the changes from last year to this year. When it comes to Camara Hub’s performance, as reported by school leaders, the average score is 80% against 77% in the previous year. This is a total score based on a range of indicators of satisfaction levels, such as reliability of hardware and relevance of training. As such, it provides an accurate overview of satisfaction levels.
The ‘attitude of Camara staff’ and ‘ease of communicating with Camara hubs’ are the highest scoring performance areas. These two high scores indicate that school management is generally happy with the way Camara staff conduct themselves and communicate with schools.
In addition to teachers and school representatives, students were also asked about their perception of the Camara provided ICT equipment. The chart below shows the results of the questions asked. The aggregated score is a combination of students responding either ‘Agree’ or ‘Strongly Agree’ to the statements. As can be seen, students reported high levels of satisfaction with using the Camara provided computers for their learning.
Overall, 92% of school leaders reported having a positive experience with Camara and there is a positive trend across the surveyed countries in terms of school leader reported performance of Camara hubs and satisfaction level of school representatives, teachers and students.
ICT Integration
An important area for achieving positive change in education through ICT is effective integration into teaching and learning. Therefore, teachers and school leaders were asked about the integration of ICT into teaching and learning following engagement with Camara and whether these outcomes have been positive for them. The chart below shows the results of some the most important outcomes in relation to ICT integration into teaching and learning.
To sum up, the results of the M&E exercise indicate that the Camara provided ICT equipment and training continue to positively impact the teaching and learning process in partner schools.
Camara’s Ten Year Impact
Since 2005, Camara has raised and generated €20m, trained 24,000 teachers across 4,000 eLearning Centres, and installed 80,000 computers, enabling 1,800,000 children to improve their educational outcomes, including the attainment of better grades.
Compared to 2014, the number of computers distributed increased by 6%, the number of teachers trained increased by 46% and the number of impacted students increased by 6%.