Concern Worldwide

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Concern Worldwide

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Founded in 1968, Concern Worldwide is an international, non-governmental humanitarian organization dedicated to the reduction of suffering and working towards the ultimate elimination of extreme poverty, with more than 4,700 staff members in 26 countries across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Concern Worldwide targets the root causes of extreme poverty through programs in health and nutrition, education, livelihoods, WASH, gender equality, climate, and environment.

For over 50 years, Concern has been working in Education to sustainably improve the lives of vulnerable children and out-of-school adolescents living in extreme poverty and those affected by crisis and conflict by increasing access to high-quality, safe, and protective education. In 2023, Concern’s education programs reached 1.1 million people, including children, school personnel, community and family members. We work across both development and humanitarian contexts and where possible in partnership with Ministries of Education, to strengthen existing systems and influence lasting change at national, district, and school community levels. Our education programs focus on four objectives:

  1. Improving access to education: We emphasize reaching the most vulnerable children and adolescents who have been excluded from education. We consider the barriers to education access and act on those with integrated multi-sectoral responses. We aim to support education systems to monitor and improve Time-on-Task (student attendance, teacher attendance, and hours of curricular instruction) and build the capacity of community-school management mechanisms to improve awareness and access to education for girls, children living in conditions of extreme poverty and those affected by crisis.
  2. Improving quality of education: We recognize that teachers are the most important resource for improving learning. Concern supports teacher training and in-classroom coaching for continuous teacher professional development to ensure that all children have the best opportunities for learning. We focus on foundational literacy and numeracy in formal and non-formal settings and provide technical support to the Ministry of Education to ensure system strengthening whenever possible.
  3. Promoting child well-being: We support child and adolescent well-being to ensure healthy development and effective learning and aim to improve the capacity of education systems and communities to prevent and effectively respond to violence, including school-related gender-based violence. Prevention and response mechanisms are embedded in all program activities ensuring Protection is mainstreamed throughout the interventions. We also support children, their caregivers, and the community to ensure they build skills to protect themselves through Psychosocial Support and Social and Emotional Learning.
  4. Improving the connectedness and quality of education programming: We work towards having education programs that are holistic, inclusive, conflict-sensitive, and connected. We strengthen education systems where possible, address factors of exclusion that prevent marginalized children and adolescents from meaningfully accessing education, mitigate potential risks of unintended contribution to conflict, promote social cohesion, and ensure meaningful integration and connectedness of education programs with cross-sectoral and life cycle approaches.

For more information on Concern, please visit concernusa.org and follow us on X/Twitter (@concernwwus) and Facebook.

For more information on Concern Active Citizenship, please visit schools.concernusa.org and follow us!

 

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Students in a school supported by Concern in Sila Province, Chad.

Photo credits: Pierre Maget/Concern Worldwide

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