Evolving Girls’ Education Programming

Our Girls’ Education Program,⁴ for example, has gone through multiple changes in the last 18 years. The changes have not been linear. They have included various ups and downs, extensions, and, yes, contractions linked loosely to Room to Read’s phases of growth. Each milestone in Figure 4.2 represents a change to our programmatic approach. The line represents the relative effort that we have put into our work with individual girls over time. This line grows substantially in earlier years and, in fact, tapers and decreases a bit as we have become more mature, more efficient in our service delivery, and more focused on system-level reform.

We’ve learned from many experiences over the years and have adjusted the Girls’ Education Program accordingly. First, we decided to take a whole-school approach. This meant providing life-skills education and mentoring to all girls in a school and giving more targeted material and academic support to girls who had specific needs. That way we could promote a critical cluster of girls to work together and increase buy-in and collaboration from a larger school community. Our financial and time investments were necessarily larger, but they were also more targeted. This also meant that social mobilizers could concentrate their work on the same number of girls—the same 50 or so—but in a single school instead of multiple schools. In many cases, this meant deploying more than one social mobilizer in the same school if there was a large population of girls to support.

Second, we decided to focus on lower secondary school as the entry point for the program. This meant supporting individual girls for approximately six to seven years rather than 12 to 13 years from the beginning of primary school, as we had done previously. While this approach provides less overall support for individual girls, it targets the time in a girl’s educational career when she is most vulnerable for dropping out and enables us logistically to work with an entire cohort of girls together in one school rather than primary school girls who might otherwise scatter to multiple schools when entering lower secondary school. And in identifying lower secondary schools in poor communities that had gender disparities, we had the opportunity to support entire cohorts of girls who could break through the proverbial grass, corrugated tin, or terra-cotta ceilings. These vanguards of young women would demonstrate the collective power of girls’ success and change community views about the possibilities of girls completing schools and the benefits of their doing so.

The answer to the question “Why not the boys?” was that girls continue to be underserved and discriminated against in many places in the world. This is an issue that Murphy-Graham and Lloyd document well in their article about empowering adolescent girls in developing countries.⁵ Girls need additional support to navigate what continues to be a biased world until such time that girls’ completion of school and transition to the next phases of their lives is just as smooth as that of boys.

We also began to do a better job targeting schools and communities with clear gender disparities so that it would be obvious to all why girls deserved extra support. These responses have not allayed communities’ concerns completely. In many poor places, where boys have almost as many challenges as girls, it can be difficult to provide services to some children but not others. On a personal level, it draws on one’s heartstrings to see boys peeking in classroom windows to see what the girls are doing and not be able to join the activity. And in some cases, we do involve boys and men, particularly in the spirit of supporting their sisters and daughters. But we still believe that there are enough important challenges faced by half the world’s population that a targeted and effective Girls’ Education Program is essential for promoting an equitable world.

In our own neighborhoods as well as most of the communities in which we work around the world, we see that girls and boys still experience life in very different ways. Girls and boys arrive at school with different early childhood experiences in their homes, they have different experiences in classrooms and the larger school community, and they often need different skills when they finish school to be successful in the next phases of their lives. This is the case irrespective of whether girls choose to attend university, join the workforce, or focus on family and public life.

By 2010, a decade after we first started the program, Room to Read had identified nine major components of an effective girls’ education program: material support, academic support, life skills, mentoring, gender-responsive instruction, family and community engagement, effective partnerships with local organizations, government engagement, and monitoring and feedback. The plan was for country teams to complete content development for each program area over a four- to five-year period. Each did so with gusto. In fact, there was so much enthusiasm for ensuring that girls had all the supports necessary to be successful in school and life that the sheer amount of work that we expected became overwhelming.

Remarkably, and despite these challenges, we have experienced tremendous success in keeping girls in school and supporting their life-skills development. According to Room to Read’s 2016 Global Results and Impact Report,⁶ for example, we are still seeing much lower dropout rates (6 percent) compared to the general population of girls. And among Girls’ Education scholars who stay in school, 95% advance to the next grade, and 55% of Girls’ Education graduates continue to tertiary education the year after they graduate even though they receive no additional support from Room to Read.

Yet by 2013 it was clear that we were asking the Girls’ Education Program to do too much. We needed to streamline our program activities. Perhaps it was not urgent for teachers to become experts in the history of women’s suffrage in their countries—which had become part of the program in some countries—but instead simply to recognize how classroom interactions are different for boys and girls. Perhaps it was not practical to ask that girls participate in weeklong residential life-skills camps if they only have a few weeks of vacation time per year. In attempting to streamline our programs, we did a lot of soul-searching and made uncomfortable—and unpopular—decisions about trade-offs.

The most difficult decision was about academic support. This was originally meant to help girls who were struggling to stay in school to receive targeted tutoring to pass their classes and exams. However, in many countries, it had become the most expensive program element (eating up more than a third of program costs) and was increasingly being used to provide regular tutoring for most girls in a school rather than targeting girls who had the greatest needs. This program element was attempting to compensate for the poor instruction in schools themselves. In some schools, we were hearing allegations that teachers were deliberately teaching at a low level during the regular school day so that they could then be paid to provide supplemental tutoring activities after hours (a claim that is often made against tutoring as an approach in general). To the extent this is true, this extra tutoring assistance for just a few girls was harming the broader population of students. Regardless of how pervasive this was throughout targeted schools, it would never be possible for limited Room to Read funding to counteract poor teaching.

For this reason, we made the difficult decision to limit academic support to life-skills activities that promote good study habits and peer tutoring. This decision was most difficult for social mobilizers and other staff who work closely with schools. It meant that certain girls would no longer be receiving a valuable service. However, most staff have accepted this change and have done a great job of reinvesting previous tutoring costs in more strategic and sustainable program activities, such as providing study sessions prior to big exams and helping girls organize study clubs among themselves.

The most important reason for streamlining was to make the Girls’ Education Program more manageable for social mobilizers and other staff. This has meant reducing some of the other activities that may in fact have been benefiting the children whom we serve. Although home visits to talk with parents, for example, have a huge effect in shaping parents’ views about school, we just do not have the person-power to visit every girl’s home. We have had to limit visits to those situations in which girls are at risk of dropping out.

These close connections among content development, strategic implementation, and monitoring allow us to be more systematic when developing future programs without overloading the system. For example, we have developed a “risk-and-response” protocol that identifies girls who are at risk of dropping out of school and uses that information to target services to them. The four risks that we monitor are (1) girls being out of school for three days or more, (2) girls missing life-skills education activities, (3) girls struggling academically, and (4) parents’ or guardian’s absences from parent meetings.

We prioritize these girls for one-on-one mentoring activities. For example, when Evelyne does not show up to school for a few days, her social mobilizer, Sonia, starts to talk to Evelyne’s friends. If friends have not heard from Evelyne, Sonia makes a call to Evelyne’s contacts, including Evelyne’s parents. Sonia then stops by the parents’ home to talk with them about Evelyne’s whereabouts and brainstorm solutions with Evelyne and her parents about any bigger problems that jeopardize Evelyne’s education.

Evolving Literacy Programming

Like the Girls’ Education Program, Room to Read’s Literacy Program has also undergone a substantial evolution over the last 18 years. Figure 4.3 identifies the new elements of our programmatic approach over time. The shape of the trajectory is also like that of the Girls’ Education Program, as has been the progression from start-up, through transition, to more maturity.

Room to Read has added new program elements as we learned about the complexity of helping children to read. However, at a certain point, the work became so complicated and we had so many different staff members going to individual schools that we began to stumble over one another. The schools themselves were becoming overwhelmed. We therefore needed to streamline and coordinate the work to make it easier to implement for ourselves and our partner schools.

The same open, data-driven, and reflective approach that shaped the Girls’ Education Program also inspired better literacy programming over time. Room to Read’s early staff recognized that school libraries were an important setting to promote reading. Libraries are places where children can see, touch, and experience the power of reading. They can go from one book on a shelf to the other and unlock powerful worlds to inspire their imaginations and understanding of the universe. We often say that Room to Read libraries are a window to the world as well as a mirror to one’s own community and culture. An inviting library can be a sanctuary from the challenges of poverty. It can be a world that overwhelms children’s senses in a positive way. Room to Read’s first program, and perhaps the program for which it is still best known, establishes school libraries. This means converting an existing schoolroom into a library or making an existing library more enticing and accessible for children in primary schools. It also means ensuring that shelves are filled with hundreds of titles that children crave to read.

Nevertheless, even from Room to Read’s earliest days, staff realized the challenges of these early aspirations. The two most urgent challenges were space and book content. Many schools in low-income countries are severely oversubscribed. They have too many children for the available teachers and schoolrooms. Although a school might allow Room to Read to use one of its existing classrooms to establish a new school library, the chances were very good that the library would be reconverted to a classroom or another function over time because space was at such a premium. Room to Read therefore began to work with communities to build additional structures. In some instances, it was a separate building that would be used for a school library. In others, it was a school block that would reduce crowding and make it more likely that the community would sustain a library in a new or existing room.

The second obvious early realization was that young children in a country such as Nepal—and many other places in the world—would have a hard time reading donated English books. While they could enjoy the illustrations, very few could read in English. Room to Read therefore decided to begin purchasing storybooks in local languages to fill libraries. The problem was that very few children’s books existed in local languages, and the ones that did exist were often low in quality. This included the physical aspects of the book (for example, poor paper quality, fading inks, and weak binding) as well as content and illustrations. Many local storybooks were just not fun or enchanting enough to inspire a lifelong passion for reading. The books did not entice children into fantastical worlds that they could explore just as they were beginning to make sense of letters and sounds as Dr. Seuss and other authors did for us as children.

This lack of quality children’s literature compelled us to act. Dinesh, who in 2003 was our country director in Nepal, went to all the bookshops and markets in Kathmandu looking for any title appropriate for children. He e-mailed Erin and John and told them all he could find were ten children’s books, and they were not even great quality stories. Immediately, the three decided they had to find a way to help develop better books locally so they could support the nascent children’s book industries in low-income countries. Since Room to Read was creating the demand for children’s books by establishing school libraries, we needed to ensure capacity was built as well on the supply side of the equation by supporting the creation of the content.

For these reasons, Room to Read initiated the third component of our literacy program: to inspire and teach authors and illustrators to create storybooks for young children. We created training activities, developed competitions, and contracted with known authors and illustrators to develop new book titles, including fiction and nonfiction. We then used any books available or newly created that met minimum quality standards to fill new libraries.

Nothing is more inspiring than to work with a group of young, creative writers and illustrators; to help them apply their skills to develop a new genre of storybooks in a country; to see their photos on books that appear in schools throughout the country; and to see their careers take off in this new sector. In 2015, for example, two young Vietnamese artists, Phung Nguyen Quang and Huynh Kim Lien, who started their careers by attending one of Room to Read’s writers’ and illustrators’ workshops three years earlier, won the Asia-wide Scholastic Picture Book Award competition. And in 2016, because of training a new group of young authors and illustrators in Indonesia, three of their resulting storybooks even won an international competition, the Samsung KidsTime Authors’ Award in Singapore. The grand prize winner, Lautkah Ini by Yayasan Literasi Anak, translates to “Is This the Sea?” It is a beautifully illustrated book, using Indonesian batik designs, that depicts a conversation between two talking raindrops.

Our other hope was to use supply to provoke demand. If children could borrow captivating books from school libraries and read to themselves or their families, perhaps parents would begin to appreciate children’s books in a new way—tipping the scale toward promoting the culture of reading in communities that had never had books, newspapers, or street signs. Perhaps educational officials would also take notice and begin to incorporate children’s books into their planning and budgeting. Perhaps, too, the authors and illustrators who created books for Room to Read could increase their visibility and be contracted by commercial publishers to write more titles, and so on.

These hopes have come to fruition in many countries in which Room to Read has worked. Several now have more robust children’s book publishing industries. When Room to Read started to work in Nepal, for example, there were very few children’s books available. Now, 18 years later, Nepal has a robust children’s book publishing industry with hundreds of storybook titles available, some in multiple local languages. This is a fantastic example of a nonprofit organization playing a catalyzing role in creating a public or private good, and ensuring the long-term sustainability of a valuable product or service.

The next disruption in Room to Read’s approach was a result of the first external evaluation of our programs (2006). We commissioned this study as an early attempt to learn about the benefits of our work and opportunities for program improvement. Paik and Walberg, the lead researchers, found that Room to Read had done a good job in constructing school blocks and separate library rooms, establishing child-friendly libraries, and filling the libraries with new children’s books. However, the libraries themselves were underutilized. Children were not venturing into libraries on their own and checking out books at the rates that we had expected. The reason is that children had not developed the habit of reading or the reading skills necessary to take advantage of new library resources. One strategy was to hire a new cadre of school-level support staff to promote the habit of reading with families, school officials, and community leaders. This will be discussed shortly.

The other strategy was to launch an activity to help teachers teach children to read. This was the organization’s most ambitious program decision to date. After all, teaching children to read is historically the purview of each country’s ministry of education. What business did Room to Read have in delving into this work? Why did we believe that we could help improve children’s reading in early grades in ways that each country’s ministry had not been able to do? What expertise did we have? It turns out we were ahead of our time.

In recent years, helping teachers become better reading instructors has developed into one of the primary areas of financial investment among international development assistance agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, the World Bank, the United Nations, and others for low-income countries. Hundreds of millions of dollars, euros, and pounds have gone into preservice and in-service teacher education to promote better reading instruction. However, Room to Read began to work on helping teachers teach reading more effectively long before the current influx of interest and cash.

What were we thinking? All we knew was that our other program activities would not be successful unless children in underserved communities learned to read. And if children could not learn to read, they could not become passionate, lifelong, independent readers. We therefore had to try to do something.

Fortunately, we had the benefit of outstanding staff and the goodwill of governments and communities to try some new approaches. We started in 2007 by creating “reading kits” that could be used in libraries. Later, and in line with our culture of research, monitoring, and evaluations, we conducted gap analyses of countries’ early-grade reading textbooks and the support that teachers received as part of their ongoing professional development (or lack thereof) and created materials and strategies to fill the gaps. Still later, we began to develop entire early-grade reading programs that schools could use as alternatives to existing programs.

Our chief program officer at the time was an internationally renowned reading expert. We also sought extensive advice about reading instruction strategies from other experts. When we crafted our own philosophical approach to instructional support, it was rooted deeply in the scientific literature, particularly in the results of the National Reading Panel in the United States in 2000. In a nutshell, there are five major parts to children’s reading: (1) the ability to understand sounds, (2) the ability to link sounds to letters and letters to words, (3) the speed and accuracy with which children can read words and string words together into sentences, (4) expanding vocabulary, and ultimately, (5) comprehension. We also add writing as an important part of children’s literacy skills development. This is not just dictation, or the ability to pen letters and words, but also the ability to write ideas in complete sentences.

Determining the best way to teach children to read turns out to be an extraordinarily contentious issue, so much so that the controversies over time have been called the “reading wars.” Although these debates continue to simmer around the world, Room to Read was neutral and agnostic initially but increasingly confident in our approach as we learned about the neuroscientific and linguistic underpinnings of effective instruction. With continuing focus, goodwill among partners and communities, and honest reflection and improvement, Room to Read has established one of the foremost reading skills programs in the international field.

Regular evaluation results indicate that children whose teachers participate in Room to Read professional development and coaching activities learn to read at a high level and, increasingly, on time per individual country standards. Our most recent results, from Laos, indicate that children in program schools are reading an average of 39 words per minute by the end of grade 2 compared to similar children at nonprogram schools, who are reading approximately 14 words per minute. Among Laotian children in program schools, 42% are reading at the 45 word-per-minute benchmark or higher,⁷ the point at which they are reading fast enough that they can really begin to remember what they are reading and store that information for recall.

Fluent readers also enjoy reading more, in the same way we enjoy riding a bike more if we don’t have to be consciously worried about balancing. In Sri Lanka, in our recent Sinhala assessment, children are reading an average of 59 words per minute, with 75% of children reading more than the minimum 45 words per minute. In Bangladesh, the average fluency rate is 52 words per minute. We are among the organizations that are “cracking the code” and starting to help large numbers of children from poor communities to develop critical foundational skills in reading.

Like our work in the Girls’ Education Program, we still have a lot of work to do in literacy. We have had to streamline our content, hone what we offer, and integrate the various components of the Literacy Program to focus on the activities that have the most impact. Every day we are working to make our instructional materials easier to use and more self-guided for teachers. We are also becoming more rigorous about our coaching and support visits to schools to ensure that we are understanding how long it takes for a school to create a functional library or a teacher to become strong in reading instruction so that we can manage our staff time more efficiently. This information also becomes important to share with school systems so they have a better understanding about how to manage their own staff time when they start to take over these program activities at a provincial or national level.

Our highest priority is to have high-quality, consistent school support in our existing reading activities in classrooms and libraries before we consider reintroducing some of the other literacy activities that countries have tried implementing in the past.

Input Stage

Room to Read’s focus in our early years was to ensure that communities had the financial and material resources to further its objectives for what we now call the Girls’ Education Program. More complicated were the earliest Literacy Program activities. Between 2000 and 2003, Room to Read launched four separate programs to promote children’s reading in schools: (1) Reading Room (Libraries) Program (2000), (2) School Room (Construction) Program (2000), (3) Computer Room Program (2001), and (4) Local Language Publishing Program (2003).

These programs required substantial oversight. They largely focused on distributing materials to schools. The Reading Room Program, for example, required shelving, flooring, and modest furniture in addition to the books themselves. The School Room Program required an initial commitment from communities for land on which to build new libraries or school blocks as well as tools and building supplies. Local Language Publishing required the logistics around international book donations and local procurement. It also required substantial work in book distribution, including customs clearance for international book donations.

Harmonizing all these processes was a major organizational focus and success in Room to Read’s first few years. It was an essential first step before anything else was possible.

Output Stage

Room to Read entered a period of rapid growth. From an initial focus on Nepal in 2000, Room to Read expanded into Vietnam in 2001, Cambodia in 2002, India in 2003, and both Laos and Sri Lanka in 2005—still in the start-up phase of program work in which we emphasized program inputs. The reason for selecting each new country varied.

The first expansion, into Vietnam, for example, was because Erin had been working there for Unilever. Cambodia was a country of great need and came as an extension of our work in Vietnam. A key new investor who was passionate about India funded our early expansion there. We then conducted a more formal expansion study and identified Laos and Sri Lanka as key targets for future expansion to build out hubs in both Southeast and South Asia. We started working on an expansion into Laos next. The 2004 tsunami in Asia created a great need in Sri Lanka, and we expanded to the country in response faster than expected, ultimately launching into both Laos and Sri Lanka in 2005.

This is the time that we started to enter the transitional phase of Room to Read’s programmatic work, the point at which we began to shift our focus from inputs to outputs. We measured success in several ways: the number of new girls served, the libraries and school blocks built, the books published, and the computer rooms established. As promised to our investors, every day we strove to support more children in more locations.

It was during this period that we began to monitor our work in earnest. Our staff began to chart the number of projects completed year on year as we advanced toward our goal of serving 10 million children. From 2000 to 2005, for example, Room to Read helped 1,700 girls stay in school. This grew from 10 girls in Nepal in the year 2000 to 1,757 girls in Nepal, Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Laos, and Sri Lanka by 2005. We also established 2,590 school libraries in the same period.

Training and Monitoring Stage

By 2005, with thousands of projects up and running relatively smoothly, our leadership had some breathing room to reflect on our first five years and what was to come next. Encouraged by the board of directors and others, we launched our first cross-national evaluation. Our question was, “How are we doing, and what more do we need to do to be even more successful?” The feedback we received from surveys and discussions with our country directors and field staff was that projects were already successful in many ways. We had built numerous school blocks and libraries, filled them with beautiful books, and granted thousands of scholarships and organized activities for local girls.

What was still not clear was the quality of what we were doing. We had ample evidence that planned projects were being completed in targeted villages and rural areas. But we also had some anecdotal evidence that our people on the ground were moving onto the next project without necessarily ensuring that the infrastructure they’d put into place was sufficient to achieve our ultimate organizational goals. In fact, reports from different countries indicated that the libraries we’d built were being underutilized and that poor girls were still struggling in school despite being given scholarships. That’s when we realized that projects need more than bricks, mortar, and material support to be successful. We had to somehow get communities and school staff to understand and get behind the purpose of all the infrastructure and programs we had put in place.

Our programmatic focus—as well as our strategic approach—therefore changed accordingly. We needed to develop new programs and necessary training for activities such as how to most effectively use and manage the libraries, how best to teach reading to students, how to coach life-skills education, and how to mentor girls through tough challenges.

On the monitoring side, we realized we needed to visit the school more frequently and change the focus of the visits. Previously, school visits had focused on the development of the physical infrastructure. Were new library buildings or school blocks completed? Did libraries have the necessary furniture and books? Now, we had to track the extent to which new program activities were being implemented and sustained over time.

During the period between 2006 and 2012, we realized we needed to standardize best practices and other “nonnegotiable” aspects of our programs that everyone around the globe needed to adhere to and communicate those effectively throughout our entire organization.

Coaching and Support Stage

Changes in staffing and programming required a whole new way of working. By deepening Room to Read’s program content and training local school staff and community members, we were spending a lot more money. Establishing long-term relations with staff in thousands of schools is very different from simply building schools and furnishing libraries.

As we hired more staff, our per-project costs continued to rise. Yet the actual returns on our investments were not clear. On the one hand, anyone who visited schools over the years could see program quality improving. On the other hand, these advances in quality were not consistent across countries—or even within villages and rural areas within countries. We saw large gaps between the strongest and weakest projects, and we did not have much insight into the reasons for those gaps.

Why were there so many disparities in project outcomes? We observed in school visits and in discussions with country leaders that the diversity in staff skills was the culprit. Some staff members were phenomenal. They were excellent trainers and knew their communities well. However, the skills our local staff members possessed seemed to be largely related to their previous experience—not to the training we were providing. We were somehow failing in our training to bring staff skills up to a consistently high level. Diversity also made our overall success rates difficult to monitor and evaluate. Although Room to Read had as strong a monitoring and evaluation system as any nonprofit organization that we knew, it was becoming difficult to monitor and evaluate multiple variations in the same core program activities.

As any good evaluator knows, the best way to evaluate an intervention is to hold everything constant in two situations except for a single variable. However, this kind of research was simply not possible for Room to Read in 2012. Although we had developed central organizational guidelines for each program, there were too many differences in actual implementation to know what truly constituted the “core” program approach. This diversity also made it difficult to hire and orient new staff. Each new hire had to understand the program variations for their geographical areas or country. In some places, new hires were fortunate to receive orientation materials developed by field-based or country office staff. Unfortunately, this was usually not the case. With such a wide diversity in program activities, it was impossible to develop a structured, high-quality process to consistently train new coaches, facilitators, and mobilizers in their jobs. Even more importantly, the rising staffing costs would price Room to Read out of the market as an efficient implementer of effective educational programming. Something needed to change.

We made a difficult decision in 2012 and 2013 to swing the pendulum away from local diversity and focus on creating innovative programs we could use across all countries. With core, worldwide program resources in hand, both the global and country offices could recontextualize the materials we created to be appropriate for each country’s needs. The expectation was for teams to work together to translate new worldwide materials into local languages and modify materials as necessary to be culturally appropriate and administratively acceptable. The hope was that core materials would change as little as possible so that Room to Read could take advantage of the consistency for hiring and training new staff as well as monitoring program implementation.

The swing of the pendulum away from localized programming toward more centrally organized, consistent programming was also a big cultural shift for Room to Read. While most staff understood the logic of the change, it has not been easy for everyone to accept. Change is not easy, and people are often quite reluctant to move away from what they have done in the past—particularly if they were the ones who developed the original program activities for their communities or country.

The good news is that this transition in Room to Read’s program approach has been a success. More than four years after starting the global content development, we have completed the core worldwide materials. Most of the content has been contextualized and is now being used in countries. Country staff have been trained in the use of the materials and are in turn helping school-level support staff in their roles as coaches. Staff in all parts of the organization have more clarity about the ultimate goals of our programming, the process for helping each community achieve its goals, and the steps along the way. Organizational materials have become much easier to use, and we have developed more meaningful research and evaluation activities.

Early evaluation results of schools that have used the contextualized worldwide materials are promising. There is still work to be done to ensure that all school-level support staff have the content, training, and skills that they need to provide consistent, high-quality services, but we are much farther down this road than at any other time in Room to Read’s history.

In hindsight, we talk about this consolidation at Room to Read now as though it was inevitable. We forget that it was a difficult decision and not easy to execute.

System-Level Change Stage

Even as we continue to work on our standardized worldwide programs, we have entered a new stage of work: support for system-level change. This means work for change in laws, policies, and practices that apply to all schools in a provincial, state, or national school system. We have been flirting with this idea for more than 10 years but only now have the resources and experience to try it out.

Some organizations attempt to collaborate with authorities to create system-level changes early in their evolution, but we have been conservative, not wanting to get into it until we were ready. Moreover, system-level change requires another psychological shift, and we needed time to incorporate this new mindset into our organizational mindset and culture.

Historically, our staff has been driven—you could even say obsessed—by the goal of serving individual children. But incorporating a system-level approach shifts at least some of our focus away from individual children. Although we are still fully committed to every child and every family that we serve, some of our attention has now shifted to government engagement and, just as importantly, how we can organize program activities that can be sustained by the government system and other organizations.

This new emphasis means that we must make new choices. It could mean that we no longer have the same staffing resources to visit an adolescent girl’s family multiple times if she is at risk for dropping out of school. Instead, we may instead share our “risk-and-response” tool in a more structured way with schools so that teachers and school administrators can be more aware of girls who are on the verge of dropping out. It is no surprise that this kind of a shift is uncomfortable. It is particularly so for Room to Read’s school support staff in local communities. What is the right answer when deciding between supporting 100 children at 100% effort versus supporting 500 children at 75% effort? The trick is to figure out how much of our base programming is necessary to achieve our overarching program goals. What is that minimum threshold of success?

The honest answer, though, is that we do not yet know. Like everything else we do at Room to Read, answering this question requires hard work, good monitoring, honest reflection, and responsive program adaption along the way. Again, having the goodwill and trust of the communities in which we work helps tremendously. They know that we are acting in good faith and have been willing partners as we continue to evolve our programmatic approach.