Communities in Albania
“A caring second home”
DOCUMENT AUTHOR: Mrs Angjela Luka
GOOD PRACTICE TITLE: “A caring second home”
KIND OF PRACTICE: Community life / Youth empowerment
PLACE: Shkoder, Albania
CONTEXT, FIELD OF INTERVENTION:
The Asta Centre Project is a community youth centre in the city of Shkodra, Albania, which provides after-school care to disadvantaged youth.
Shkodra is a city in the North of Albania with a highly diverse population which acts as an economic and social magnet for the surrounding mountainous areas. Traffic, water, and electricity infrastructure, as well as employment opportunities and educational opportunities, have historically been sparse in the surrounding areas. Towards the end of the communist regime, many of the inhabitants of those areas moved into the Shkodra valley in order to escape grinding poverty and general poor conditions. This migratory pattern led to the establishment of ghettoised areas around the city with slum-like conditions. Many of the rural migrants have not succeeded in accessing the formal economy, rather getting by on a day-to-day basis by working in the informal sector as well as relying on handouts.
In order to break the cycle of poverty and enable a better life for future generations, it is important to design interventions around the children of these migrants who, while enrolled in public school, often do not receive any care after school – including a lack of meals, support with homework, and opportunities to play in a safe environment. Helping children succeed at getting an education and being tied into society has proven internationally to deliver outsized results, boosting future earnings and growth impact, supporting better health choices and benefitting future generations, helping institutions and public services work better, and building social cohesion and resilience1 .
PERIOD:
2008 ongoing
POPULATION, PARTICIPANTS:
Participants in our intervention are chosen by engaging with local schools, which advise us on which children appear to have a particular need for support. We are focused on the age bracket of 6-14 where we are able to have the most impact due to the high ability of those students to adapt to new practices. On a daily basis, we are frequented by an average of 35 students; most attend the centre every single day. Since the inception of the centre in 2008, we have been able to serve around 500-600 students overall.
COORDINATORS:
The Asta Centre is coordinated by local employees. It is funded by the Austrian NGO ‘Schüler helfen Schüler’ and the private sector company Omicron.
METHODOLOGY (HOW THE PRACTICE WORKS):
Our methodology entails a holistic, five-pronged approach to supplementing the educational, social, and individual aspects of our students lives. Below is a table with a summary of our interventions components and their intended effects.
PARTICIPATORY PROCESS:
After receiving a recommendation from a local school for a student to participate, we speak to the student’s family and explain the project to them. Upon agreement, we introduce the student to the centre. We then expect the student to come to the centre after school on a daily basis, where we provide the after-school programme detailed in our intervention methodology. Below is an approximation of the process of the after-school programme:
1. Homework
2. Setting the lunch table
3. Mealtime
4. Individualised curricula: aiming to support students in the aspects they are most interested in and/or need most support with
5. Pickup from family
TIME TO BE SUCCESFUL (HOW MANY TIME THE PRACTICE TAKE TO ACHIEVE THEIR OBJECTIVES):
On average, our students remain with us for 5-7 years. The Asta Centre is an in-depth intervention which sides with the depth side of depth vs. breadth debates. We aim to provide continuity for our participants and follow them throughout their childhood and youth in order to achieve successful results.
Towards the beginning of the intervention, we tend to see a fairly immediate and rapid improvement of participants’ social and educational wellbeing.
As the learning of social skills is one central part of our intervention, we are focused on maintaining a relatively stable cohort for long durations, in order to provide students with the stability they otherwise tend to lack in their lives. We continue providing occasional for them, for example when they are applying for jobs. In turn, many of our participants come back to our centre to volunteer.
VALIDITY (IF THE PARTICIPANTS THINK THAT THE PRACTICE RESOLVED THE PROBLEMATIC):
The in-depth, qualitative nature of the Asta Centre Programme makes it difficult to assess the validity of our intervention in a statistical manner. However, since our intervention life cycle includes many of our previous participants returning as volunteers, we are able to gauge in what ways we were able to provide them with the necessary support for their success from informal interviews. In these interviews, students communicate to us that we were a central factor in helping them attain the skills for getting a particular job, as well as providing the social stability that allowed them to flourish.
IMPACT:
The intervention aims to have a wide-ranging and in-depth impact on each students’ life, in particular in relation to social wellbeing and educational (and later job) attainment.
On a societal level, our intervention increases the human capital of Shkodra, as well as enabling upward mobility for poor migrant families. For a detailed writeup of our intended impacts, please refer to the table detailing our intervention components.
INNOVATION:
Our funding model is innovative in that it combines NGO funding with private sector funding.
Our mission of providing a ‘caring second home’ has inspired many centres in the area and led them to take a more human-centred, caring approach to youth work
RESOURCES OR CONDITIONS NEEDED FOR THE PRACTICE:
1. Employ a teaching and maintenance staff.
2. Rent for the centre.
3. Funds for daily meals.
4. Funds for summer camps and extracurricular excursions.
LIMITATIONS:
Due to our in-depth approach, our biggest limitation is our capacity – we cannot serve a large group of participants with our model.
LEARNED LESSONS: :
Originally, we included a group of around 50 students in the intervention. We realised that this was not beneficial to achieving our impact goals and resolved to downsize the intervention over time. We learned that we needed to keep within an age limit of 6-14 in order to achieve the best possible outcomes. We are still negotiating how to best achieve programme graduation in a timely and sustainable manner.
SUSTAINABILITY:
We have had continuous funding for the last ten years and are not foreseeing any issues with this. We are looking into whether we would benefit from any EU funding in the future. Since many of our graduates come back to volunteer in the centre, our intervention is inherently sustainable by effectively educating future volunteers.
REPLICABILITY:
Replicability of the Asta Centre programme is dependent on funding and well-educated staff; with these given, the programme should be able to be replicated anywhere.
CONCLUSION:
The Asta Centre programme is a community youth programme providing marginalised youth with a caring second home, improving their educational opportunities by employing a holistic intervention approach with a large focus on social stability. This has shown to provide students from unstable backgrounds with the foothold they need in order to go on to enter the formal market, end the cycle of poverty in their communities, and contribute to societal goals.
CONTACT (PRACTICES AUTHOR AND ORGANIZATION):
Malteser Albania Rr. Ludovik Saraci Shkoder 4001, Albania
Tel. 355692080207
E-mail: info@malteser.al