How to increase the impact of an educational program in a fragile context?

Much hard work has already been done to set up decent educational programs in fragile contexts to meet the ambition of Sustainable Development Goal 4. Fragile contexts are the world’s most dangerous places focusing on security, political and governance considerations. To make these programs succeed in these contexts, solutions need to be scaled up to reach more people. This thesis investigates how the number of assisted educational development programs can be increased. The aim was to put this to practice through this case study on the development of an educational program and its scalability. The chosen case is the development of a model by the local VVOB-team in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. With this development, VVOB wants sec-ondary agricultural schools to manage their production units well for both entrepreneurship education and income generation purposes. The second aim is to maintain ties with specialised services, small and medium-sized enterprises and farmers’ organisations for the continuous professional development of teachers in educational entrepreneurship. The final aim is to better use low-cost and relevant pedagogical tools for entrepreneurship education. During this study, research was done through surveys, structured interviews, document analysis, and field notes collection and analysis. The Management Systems International framework was applied to the development of the ETAGE-model in order to find out which optimisations to this model could be done in order to improve the scalability. The findings of this process were that effective demand through the political system is a crucial success factor when aiming at scaling up. Next to that, monitoring and evaluation of the model while designing are of great importance. Also, the simplicity of the model and thorough evaluations, preferably by an external partner, are crucial to increasing the program's impact and scalability. The results show that the chosen Management Systems International frame-work is a valuable tool to help organisations move their education programs from pilot to scale as it offered a thorough manner to detect the lacks and offers suggestions. As a suggestion for further research: the good permanent documentation of projects that go from pilot to scale will remain very important. This will not only strengthen insights but also increase the impact of future projects