Photo courtesy|Light for the World

The Girls’s Education South Sudan (GESS) Monday, 1st July, 2024 commenced a validation exercise to include boys with disability in its schools’ cash transfer program for the first time.

According to GESS, they will first have to be validated, which is a confirmation process to include eligible learners on the list of those to get the cash transfer.

“So when it comes to disability when the program started with girls, [we found out that] the disability situation was even bad. That’s why we are looking at, let’s start also giving cash transfers to learners with a disability because they have unique challenges as we know,” said Daniel Gesaka who is GESS’s team leader and finance director.

This will require the Anchors and Payam education supervisors to identify them through the South Sudan Schools’ Attendance Monitoring System.

Meanwhile, GESS is encouraging parents of children with disabilities still home to go to school and benefit from the cash transfer initiative.

“These learners with disability have huge potential. We want to talk to the parents out there that if you have a learner with a disability, please let that learner go to school. 

Dr. Kuyok Abol Kuyok, the undersecretary in the national ministry of general education and instruction said the program is part of the government’s campaigns to ensure every child goes to school.

“This is the first time that this is going to happen, because we also see that they are marginalized, and the idea is that we have to make sure that, every child, as the President has said, must go to school despite their backgrounds,”  he said.

According to GESS, the validation of eligible learners in schools commenced on 1st July 2024 and continues through mid-August 2024.

The Girls Education South Sudan program is a multi-donor partnership between the governments of the UK, Canada, EU, United States, and Sweden.

Since 2014, the GESS cash transfers have helped to address the economic and social barriers that stop girls from attending school and learning, such as poverty and early and forced marriage.

In 2023, 915,127 girls were enrolled in primary school, three times as many as when the GESS programme began in 2014.