Learning through Education and Access to Employment Pathways (LEAP)

Learning through Education and Access to Employment Pathways (LEAP), implemented by the World University Service Canada (WUSC), is aimed at increasing empowerment among girls and young women in Kakuma and Kalobeyei refugee camps, and in nearby hosting communities in Turkana County, Kenya.

As part of the four-year project (2019-2023), CGA is developing real or near real time systems to will provide conditional cash transfers (CCTs) to the most vulnerable adolescent girls and young women with low school attendance and other marginalising factors, such as disability or living in child-headed households. Cash transfers will be used to offset the cost of attending school, including menstrual hygiene management.

Output

CGA provided technical support to ensure the delivery of cash to marginalised girls in refugee camps and host communities in northern Kenya. Because of the systems CGA had put in place, we were able to expedite cash payments to students before the height of the pandemic. CGA Kenya Country Coordinator, Paul Gitonga, delivered two financial inclusion breakthroughs with Kenya’s Refugees Affairs Secretariat – for refugees to be able to access Mobile Money, and then to be able to access bank accounts.

CGA created https://leaptransfers.org, password protected information systems for users to view the dashboard (screenshots below) of real-time information about refugee students, who is eligible for cash transfers, who has received them, and other detailed, disaggregated information collected at field level. As some screenshots present below, the system also generates a variety of reports, depending on user preferences.

The system is also set up for users to record feedback received through the grievance redress mechanism (GRM). Recipients of cash transfers can call a hotline, and the collected information is reported back to project staff to record into the online systems. As stated above, the MISs are set up to produce numerous reports, including the GRM feedback, which CGA is working to integrate into the Cash Transfer tool so that feedback feeds directly into the system.