The government of Finland has granted $8.6 million (€7.65 million) to support education programmes in Somalia. This grant will be administered through UNICEF Somalia’s education programme, and Education, Culture, and Higher Education Minister, Abdullahi Abukar Haji affirmed that the partnership would improve school availability and accessibility especially for out of school children. The education programme is also aligned with Somalia’s government policy priorities as outlined in the Education Sector Strategic Plan.

The education program aims to, “double primary school enrollment, improve the quality of education and strengthen the capacity of government partners to deliver a more equitable education for all children.”

The children set to benefit most from this partnership are those from marginalized communities such as pastoral and agro-pastoral communities who make up more than 60 percent of the population, and who also often miss out on educational opportunities. The program is also pertinent because of the rising number of out of school children in Somalia, particularly in the rural areas, and the program hopes to not only reinforce pre-primary and primary school accessibility, but to also ensure more completions of the full primary education cycle. 

A new partnership between the global education foundation- Education Above All (EAA), and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Somalia, seeks to enrol more than a quarter of a million Somali children in primary school. This project will target the most marginalized children in Somalia, which includes those displaced by conflict and climate related disasters, those with disabilities, and children from nomadic households. 

This new project will be rolled out through the UNICEF-run “Strengthening Educational Pathways for Out of School Children” over a four-year period and will work to improve the quality of primary education through the following interventions: increasing school infrastructure, improving education quality and focusing on girls’ access to school, and improving data collection and analysis on out of school children in the country.

EAA intends to align this latest partnership with its new strategy of “working through localized and partner-led models to target the hardest to reach out of school children (OOSC) at the primary level”

A similar EAA-UNICEF partnership in 2014 proved greatly successful in enrolling OOSC in primary education by exceeding its targeted number of OOSC to be enrolled in school.  With this precedent, there is much hope that this new project will succeed and potentially also surpass expectations.