Comparative Analysis of the Literacy and Numeracy Assessment for Children in Daadab Refugee Camp in Kenya

Abstract

Getting marginalized and vulnerable refugee children back into learning, in physical school facilities when it is safe to do so; helping ensure that children who are unable to return to school receive contextually appropriate and operationally feasible learning was challenging, due to the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on education that left many children in refugee camps vulnerable because their parents could neither afford home-schooling nor online classes. COVID-19 left many children in Dadaab refugee camp vulnerable. Parents could not afford home-schooling and on-line classes for them. To compensate the lost learning of children aged 7 - 10 years during the pandemic, Save the Children (SC) in Kenya introduced digital learning in the camp aimed to improve their literacy and numeracy skills. The evaluation was for the pilot digital learning project, implemented for a period of one year. The purpose was to assess the contribution of digital learning on learning outcomes of children. A quasi-experimental design was used where 320 learners were assessed using three standard tools; numeracy and literacy boost and IDELA tools. Children from the intervention schools performed better than the control schools in literacy boost. However, the grand mean score achieved by them is still below average. Children from both the control and intervention groups achieved remarkably higher mean scores in the numeracy boost. Their performance was optimum in this area of assessment. The study recommends that digital learning can be scaled up and learners observed for a longer period of time with rigorous methodology applied to allow plausible results that can be attributed to the interventions.