Access to equitable quality education for all is still a great challenge in Somaliland. There are several factors which hinder access to education, resulting in out-of-school children. These include household poverty, inadequate public financing of education, cultural orientations that disadvantage the girl child, lack of physical school infrastructure, low number of trained teachers, natural calamities leading to IDPs, as well as lack of community initiative towards educating their children.

The problem of inclusive education with reference to marginalized children due to poverty and internal displacement as well as gender factors is a going concern for education stakeholders and communities at large.

Officual data show gender parity index dropped from 0.84 in 2018/2019 to 0.83 and in 2020/2021 implying that the number of girls not in school is increasing and thus more serious interventions to enroll and keep more girls in school should be instituted.

Although the scale of COVID-19 pandemic in Somaliland can be termed as moderate, closure of schools for nine months kept many children out of school and upon reopening, majority haven’t been able to return - especially among the girls. Some girls have dropped out due to early marriage and female genital mutilation. The overall goal of the project is to Contribute to improving access to equitable quality education for disadvantaged children in Somaliland.

The project identifies four major problems:

• The problem of community participation in public policy debate and accountability,
• the problem of domestic education financing,
• the problem of non inclusive education and
• the problem of capacity of CSOs working in education sector.

Key result areas in the project design are organized alongside these identified problem areas. We seek to address using four key strategies:

1. collaborative partnership with relevant government agencies to influence respective policies
2. working with communities to heighten the importance of education and their critical role in education of their children
3. using the structure of CSOs and coalition network to influence local level policy and
4. learning from project implementation process to adapt strategies and plans based on developing conditions.

The coalition believes these strategies will help them achieve the identified outcomes in the theory of change.

The first phase of the project was implemented in 2020-2021 with support from Education Out Loud of 230.400 USD.