A journey toward outcomes and scale for girls’ education in India
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By Alison Bukhari and Maharshi Vaishnav of Educate Girls
[Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of blogs written by the Educate Girls team and addressing key themes facing CEI innovators and their supporters: how to become an outcomes-focused organization, navigate the path to scale, tackle structural inequality, and help marginalized children get the education they deserve.]
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NaTakallam is a social venture that connects forcibly displaced individuals (primarily Syrian and Iraqi) with Arabic learners worldwide for language practice over Skype. Recently, they partnered with The British Council and Qatar Foundation International (QFI) to promote the dissemination of Arabic culture and language in schools around the world.
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Child care workers, preschool teachers, teacher assistants, social workers, community health workers, nurses — these are just a sampling of the many women and men who work with our youngest children to ensure their healthy development. We know that these individuals, collectively comprising the early childhood workforce, need to be better supported, but how?
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The past year at Results for Development, which founded and manages CEI, brought a bevy of new tools, insights, and impact. As we now embark on 2018, we wanted to share a few of our most viewed stories from the last 12 months. The following 10 blogs are jam-packed with practical, how-to guidance and some surprising takeaways. If there are specific topics you would like to hear about, let us know in the comments section below. And please consider subscribing to get the best of R4D Insights delivered directly to your inbox.
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Since it was founded in 2008, R4D has invited prominent individuals with significant experience in the global development community or in implementing national reforms in their own countries to act as advisors and work alongside R4D staff. Recognizing the strategic importance of this role, R4D decided to reinvigorate its senior fellow program in 2017.
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Duncan McCullough, a senior communications associate at R4D, recently caught up with Annya Crane, a project manager at Worldreader, to explore how R4D’s adaptive learning approach improved Worldreader’s understanding of the potential for mobile applications’ impact on literacy promotion.
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When a child glides a paintbrush across a canvas to compose a lake, or sculpts an elephant from clay, something magical happens. That magic is not found in the finished product, its unimportant whether the painting resembles a real lake, or if the elephant’s trunk is proportional to its body. The magic is in the process of creating.
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Recently, our early childhood education program, Little Ripples, was selected by Promising Practices in Refugee Education as one of twenty innovative, efficient, and quality education programs for refugee children globally. Launched in March 2017, the Promising Practices in Refugee Education initiative set out to identify, document, and promote innovative ways to efficiently reach refugee children and young people with quality education opportunities.
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Educators, policymakers, and funders want to know whether technology can really improve foundational numeracy skills. Rigorous evidence must continue to be collected, but our experience establishing the iiTablet Tshomiz program in South Africa’s Eastern Cape gives us confidence that online learning can make a profound positive impact.
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Globalization has created a world in which multinational companies compete against each other in a range of cultural and linguistic environments. Finding workers capable of participating in the new global economy, though, has proven challenging. According to a report by the International Commission on Financing Global Economic Opportunity, 40 percent of employers worldwide have reported having trouble finding qualified candidates.
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Sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) has the highest number of adolescents and young adults in the world. Unfortunately, SSA is also the home of the worst adolescent/youth health portraits. However, embracing medical education could improve things. It is the work of medical educators and public health stake holders to improve healthcare in this developing region.
However, it is important to note that it is in the 21st century that there have been major developments including increases in the number of medical schools, better curricula, learning equipment and facilities, improved working conditions for health workers and teaching methods. Despite the wide range of languages, corruption, inaccessibility to m-health, lack of resources and famine and civil unrest in some of the countries, medical education remains promising in the region.
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Access to education is one of the fundamental rights of every child which should be delivered in a conducive and safe learning environment. With the introduction of Universal Primary Education (UPE) and the Universal Secondary Education (USE), the Government of Uganda has greatly improved primary and secondary school enrolment for both girls and boys, including those with disabilities.
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The Innovator Interview blog series is a platform for program managers to share successes, challenges and key lessons learned from operating their programs with other members of the Center for Education Innovations (CEI) community.
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Nonprofits involved in areas that address basic needs like education or health often expect that if a project or intervention is successful, government will ultimately adopt and manage it for the longer haul. For a project to reach its potential scale and sustain impact over time, many view this as the most realistic end game. Conventional wisdom holds that governments want fully formed, tested versions of programs or interventions so that it can easily scale them up.
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This article was originally published by Rural Reporters
AFON, NIGERIA – One year ago, Prikkle Academy team landed their foot in a community called Afon, in Asa Local Government Area of Kwara State, Nigeria, to look into how to mobilize the potential of rural communities for sustainable social good.
What happened a year after has blown every imagination out of steam and has strengthened Prikkle Academy’s belief that the future of millions of youths living in rural communities can get brighter and their awesome dreams can begin to happen.
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The MASK Prize creativity competition for young Africans has just celebrated its 5th year. Encouraging resourcefulness, inventiveness and outside-box problem-solving, the MASK Prize challenges young Africans to rethink the attitudes such as ‘this is how we always do things’ and replace it with ‘how do we change things to achieve the improvement or breakthrough?'.
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Like many young people, the first day at my first job was filled with many questions; about team dynamics, office culture, organizational principles, and much more. When I joined CEI I understood the foundational importance of a quality education, but I remember thinking, ‘How can an organization based in Washington DC help improve learning and livelihood outcomes for people thousands of miles away?’
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In recent years, education technology has become inextricable from education reform, resulting in a steady increase in Edtech startups and private entities innovating in education. We ask: how can technology create more efficient institutions, will more digitally literate educators become better teachers, and will ICT integration positively impact education outcomes?
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Similarly, youth growing up in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) need more than just a game plan to be successful in achieving their goals. They must have the adequate knowledge, skills and support. This is where the developmental approach of positive youth development (PYD) comes in.
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The current growth in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) sector, has paved the way for many things, most importantly, distance education. With increased computer power, availability of internet and faster data transfers rates, e-learning has been made easier and more accessible.
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This article originally appeared in Devex
The International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA), which describes itself as an informal platform for knowledge exchange around development innovation, recently made insights from working groups more widely available in a series of reports.
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In many ways, education is about finding the right blend. This is why 'blended learning' – or the mixed use of digital and traditional learning methods - holds such promise for many of education’s toughest challenges, particularly those present in a variety of contexts throughout Africa. For those of you who have not heard of blended learning before, this article will provide a handy guide. Read on to learn about what this innovative educational strategy consists of and how it can best be implemented in sub-Sahara Africa and beyond.
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OpenIDEO’s Education in Emergencies Challenge is an open call for innovative solutions that improve educational outcomes for children and youth—particularly girls—in emergency situations. CEI shared the opportunity with CEI’s network of innovators in early June, and they wasted little time in making their voices heard.
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Tech hubs have proliferated in recent years and many have moved beyond their starting point as cheap co-working spaces into incubation centers for innovators and social entrepreneurs. Furthermore, many hubs, and the organizations that supported their initial launch, are committed to policy engagement and co-creation with the public sector because this can further support innovation and the uptake of good ideas.
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I quit my corporate career about 18 years ago and have been working in the social sector full-time ever since. What I find distressing is that while the demand for good education has increased amongst the poorer sections of the population, however, the country’s commitment to providing quality education to help the poor climb up the economic scale has actually decreased.
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Inviting a stranger into your home requires a level of trust that many development programs struggle to reach. But considering that even children enrolled in full time education spend four fifths of their waking-hours outside a classroom, interventions are increasingly broadening their activities beyond the schoolhouse.
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Lucía walks 30 minutes to the first home. When she arrives, she greets a mother and her son. She is a facilitator, or volunteer home visitor with Cuna Más, a public early childhood development (ECD) program in Peru that runs daycare centers in urban areas and a home visiting service in rural communities, like this one.
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As the popularity of basketball grows, the NBA just crowned as champions the Golden State Warriors. More than 1.5 billion people outside the United States watched the NBA last year, and international stars like Giannis Giannis Antetokounmpo, Thon Maker, and Luol Deng are inspiring children around the world to pursue new heights on and off the court.
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This article originally appeared in The Star, Kenya
Creativity can be learned. It can be strengthened, similar to our muscular ability. Those who say otherwise reflect the old notion that creativity is a 'God-given' talent we are born with or without. Failing to explain the human acts of creating new knowledge, they attribute them to the 'acts of God'.
In the 21st century, as the rate of innovation promises to be 1,000 times that of the 20th century, creativity is more essential than ever. Not only to constructing new worlds, but adapting, surviving and succeeding in them.
But, how do we learn creativity? The process has several layers.
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Since the launch of the “data revolution” in international development in 2013, the field has been abuzz with the potential transformative effect of leveraging data in many forms — big, open and citizen-generated — to deliver more targeted and impactful development outcomes for the world’s poor.
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A few months ago I experienced what you might call a lightbulb moment – seeing my then five-year-old son read his first ever book from cover to cover, after months of struggling with reading. I don’t think I’ll ever forget seeing the look on his face – the belief he’d gained that he could master anything if he really put his mind to it.
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If money is the name of the game, then financial literacy is how a player learns the rules. Education success for modernizing markets relies on an increasingly diverse set of skills, yet financial capacity may be one of the most foundational areas of growth for students, their families, and school officials around the world.
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My love of reading helped make me who I am, and it energizes my work today seeking to improve literacy for children around the world. From 2015 to 2016, I helped lead a team at Results for Development (R4D), working with donors, multilateral organizations and other stakeholders, to tackle a key barrier to children’s literacy: namely that books, particularly in mother tongue languages and at the right level, are not easily assessable to children in many countries.
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Sometimes the most memorable takeaway from a conference or summit isn’t a presentation, but an unexpected comment that resonates long after closing remarks. I recently returned from attending the Ghana Education Evidence Summit (GEES), which was held in Accra in late March and organized by Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and Ghana’s Ministry of Education.
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Students of today – the planet’s future leaders – are entirely different to students of yesterday. Many students I’ve taught are part of a new, always-connected generation that has moved beyond textbooks in their education. These students are racing ahead (or trying to), but the way we teach them hasn’t changed since the Industrial Revolution. In a Google-powered world, simple, rote memorization is obsolete.
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One of the main reasons I went back to school was to better understand quantitative methods. What I did not expect though, is for so many of my professors to explain that a laser-like focus on numbers isn’t worth much without the interviews, case studies, and stories that qualitative data provides to back it up.
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The education sector sometimes feels like the younger sibling in the global development family. We are often learning from other “big brother and sister” sectors, such as health and infrastructure, where a wealth of evidence as well as funding levels typically exceed those in education. On the one hand, this affords us the unique opportunity to learn from the successes (and failures) of work in other sectors. On the other hand, we rarely pose the question: “What can other sectors learn from education?”
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This article was originally posted on the Early Childhood Workforce Initiative blog.
Evidence is growing that early childhood development (ECD) services have a strong, positive impact on children’s development. Research from diverse contexts shows that interventions which promote nurturing care in early environments significantly improve childhood development and later adult outcomes. For example, a study of the Hogares Comunitarios de Bienestar program in Colombia, which provides child care and nutrition services to children under age six, found that adolescents ages 13-17 who had participated in the program were almost 20 percent more likely to be in school than those who had not participated.
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The Innovator Interview blog series is a platform for program managers to share successes, challenges and key lessons learned from operating their programs with other members of the Center for Education Innovations (CEI) community. This week we caught up with with Aukje te Kaat, Research Manager for Aflatoun International.
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The Roma community in Serbia faces multiple challenges, key among them long-standing discrimination and marginalization, poor living conditions, outright poverty, and limited access to health and education services. It is difficult to even know how many Roma live in Serbia – estimates range from 180,000 to 500,000.
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I love listening to highly-intelligent people considering weighty problems and carefully building their hypotheses – especially if theycan explain these thoughts in a manner that I can actually follow and understand. But having spent three days closeted in subterranean rooms with jet-lagged academics and development workers at the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) conference in Atlanta, USA, I was punch-drunk.
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The ‘youth bulge’ in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is here, and projections suggest that the high numbers of youth under-30 will not soon abate. Stakeholders from the classroom to the ministry and beyond recognize the urgency these demographics require, and are acting now to support effective investments to better harness the potential of young women and men.
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The Innovator Interview blog series is a platform for program managers to share successes, challenges and key lessons learned from operating their programs with other members of the Center for Education Innovations (CEI) community.
This week we spoke with Anuradha Roychowdhury, Corporate Donor Account Head and Resource Mobilization Champion for the Parikrma Humanity Foundation. We asked Ms. Roychowdhury about Parikrma's 'end-to-end' model, innovative teacher training methods, their plans for increased government collaboration, and more.
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When we talk about out-of-school children, we often think of the family who can’t afford a school uniform, the refugee family displaced from their home, or maybe the parent who doesn’t see the value in educating a daughter. Perhaps we think of a student who drops out of school to go to work, or stops attending when the teacher doesn’t come to class. But someone is missing.
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In a payment by results (PbR) programme, a service provider may not be paid by the donor for what they spend - the provider has financial ‘skin in the game’. The central rationale of PbR is that this ‘skin’ should increase accountability and improve performance (their ‘level of play’).
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While the importance of soft skills have been previously acknowledged by both researchers and practitioners, many questions remain unanswered:
Which soft skills have the most impact in improving outcomes for youth across sectors?
Which measurement tools are most effective at assessing these skills?
Are there guiding principles for developing these skill sets among youth? -
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The innovator interview blog series is a platform for program managers to share successes, challenges and key lessons learned from operating their programs with other members of the Center for Education Innovations (CEI) community. In this latest volume, we spoke with Kachocho Respicius Timanywa, Executive Director of the Tumaini Letu Development Organization.
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“Did you hear? There’s going to be a walkout!” I still remember the apprehension, excitement, and empowerment felt in my first protest, way back in 2003, when students in my Maryland high school demonstrated at the flag pole against the US’ planned war in Iraq. Of course, we weren’t successful in preventing the conflict, but it was the beginning of developing critical skills in myself that have served me well.
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Scaling up an innovation for maximum use and maximum benefit is never easy. The road to success is bumpy and good ideas inevitably stumble into barriers – especially when the purpose of the innovation is to improve children’s learning experiences. But innovation that can be effective, scaled up and replicated is precisely what is needed to tackle the challenges of the global learning crisis.
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This article originally appeared on the World Education Blog
Books, especially textbooks, are critical to learning, as we have been reading in the latest blog series on the World Education Blog, but they are in grievously short supply in many developing country classrooms. Results for Development (R4D) recently released a report, on which I advised, exploring the feasibility of a “Global Book Alliance” that would focus attention, expertise and resources on this crucial obstacle to effective education.
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The MASK Prize is not a ‘usual’ art competition. The entries are judged not on the artistic skills alone, but more importantly on how inventive they are. Partnering with Kenya’s leading national newspaper the Star, the MASK Prize hopes to inspire young people to be more creative, and their teachers and parents to better understand how important creativity and innovation are in our age of rapid technological change.
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I’ll be honest—choosing the greatest moments from our evaluation and learning work in the education sector wasn’t easy. In the last 12 months, we’ve been busy doing exciting, challenging, innovative work alongside smart, committed partners. But when it came down to it, there were certain things that stood out, and I managed to whittle down a long list of favorites into four 2016 highlights.
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Subpar education outcomes, exacerbated by poor teacher and student attendance, are prevalent in Peru, especially in remote communities. In order to respond to this challenge, UNICEF Peru and local NGO Kunamia introduced the EduTrac model, an SMS-based tool for improving data collection and monitoring of schools in hard-to-reach communities.
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Recently, Results for Development and its Center for Education Innovations staff met for a free-flowing discussion around their most vibrant recollections from 2016. The conversation serves as a reflection of 2016 as we transition into the new year: Clear-eyed about the challenges facing the world’s poor, but hopeful and inspired by the hard-won progress seen in our own work, as well as the impact of those with whom we have the privilege of collaborating.
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The Lessons Learned series highlights practical takeaways from CEI’s Journeys to Scale report, produced in partnership with UNICEF, that tells the story of innovative education interventions as they attempt to scale. To see past volumes of Lessons Learned, click here. To find additional details about any of these innovators’ journeys to scale and more, be sure to check out the Full Report.
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The Lessons Learned series highlights practical takeaways from CEI’s Journeys to Scale report, produced in partnership with UNICEF, that tells the story of innovative education interventions as they attempt to scale. To find additional details about any of these innovators’ journeys to scale and more, be sure to check out the Full Report.
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Today only 44% of Indian students in 8th grade can perform basic division; in Uganda the most recent SACMEQ results show that only 10% of 6th graders are reading at grade level.
Innovators are now examining every component of education to find new ways to improve quality- but at the same time, we can’t forget the critical importance of our teachers. We know that an effective, dedicated teacher can make up for a lack of resources or overcrowded classrooms. But around the world, many teachers still lack the knowledge and training to be effective. We must apply this new search for evidence and answers to an old issue, and re-examine what it means to be a teacher around the world. The good news is, initiatives to better train teachers are spreading fast. -
I am often asked why we should talk about violence when we are focusing on girls’ education programmes. The answer is easy.
Imagine being a 12 year old girl for a moment. Imagine what it would be like if you were feeling afraid when you walk to school. Imagine being beaten for making a mistake when you answered a question incorrectly in class. Imagine not feeling safe enough to go to the toilet. Imagine being told by your teacher that you are not as good as the boys. Imagine being bullied by your classmates during the breaks. Imagine being told that your education is not important because you are going to get married in a few years anyway. Imagine being this girl. -
Evidence about what actually works in improving education outcomes is lacking, as noted in a recent 3ie systematic review. We know a lot about what works in some countries, in specific contexts, some of the time, but we don’t know a lot about what works most of the time in any country, regardless of context.
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On 10 November, CEI Program Director, Donika Dimovska, participated in an Education Marketplace designed to bring together program implementers and cocoa and chocolate company representatives to explore ways to strengthen the education system in cocoa-growing areas in Cote d’Ivoire (CDI). The event, hosted by the Transforming Education in Cocoa Communities Initiative (TRECC), formally kicked off their second grant matching process in which they plan to co-design education programs with industry partners who have investments in the region.
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Fresh off the release of their latest report on an increasingly diversifying education landscape, Results for Development and the IDP Foundation continue moving the discussion forward on low-fee private schools. This was the impetus for an online discussion last Wednesday among CEI innovators, global experts, and policymakers focused on Ghana and beyond - Low-fee, High Impact? Assessing the efforts of low-fee private schools in Ghana.
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What is joint learning? It goes by a lot of names, including peer-to-peer learning, collaborative learning and joint problem-solving, to name a few. But, basically, it means gathering different groups to address a common challenge and systematically produce new ideas and knowledge.
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As critical steps towards the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals are taken, millions of children and families are responding to current failings in education by pursuing alternative approaches and seeking new providers. As a result, education sectors around the world are diversifying, and with these changes come new needs and new opportunities for research.
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Emotions ran high for people around the United States and the world this week. This week’s events, and the many months leading up to it, have once again thrown into stark relief the importance of education and opportunity for all. While we undoubtedly have a long way to go, CEI continues to find hope in the tireless efforts of innovators working around the world to defend the right of everyone – irrespective of their gender, ethnicity, health, geography or any other differentiating factor – to a good quality education.
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In October, R4D Managing Director Nicholas Burnett traveled to Vilnius, Lithuania to deliver a keynote speech at the International Step by Step Association's (ISSA) annual conference. ISSA, a learning community of early childhood development (ECD) experts and practitioners in Europe and Central Asia, is R4D's partner behind the Early Childhood Workforce Initiative.
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Having established an art education programme in some Kenyan schools a few years ago, I had to approach businesses for support. “But what does art have to do with us?!” was their reply. Many businesses do not realise that art fosters creativity (problem solving), creativity results in innovation (ideas brought to market) and innovation drives growth. They do not make the ‘art-creativity-innovation’ connection.
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The developing world’s intractable education problems require creative solutions. Richard Hanson, senior education programmes adviser with Cambridge Education, identifies the conditions for innovative approaches in education to lead to successful and sustainable learning outcomes.
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As someone who grew up in the UK, having access to books at home, in school and at my local library was something I took for granted. As a child, I always had a stack of books on the go, to the extent that I truly believed I was the real life Matilda – sadly without the magical powers.
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The Pan African Awards reward projects which are using enterprise and entrepreneurship to innovate in the field of education. There were over 400 nominations from across the continent this year, and we’re thrilled to share that four of the Shortlisted Finalists, and two of the final award recipients, are members of the CEI innovation community!
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Wondering how we can scale up progress towards achieving equitable learning opportunities? The Millions Learning team at the Center for Universal Education has compiled a list of recently-released scaling must-reads that offer tips and tools for increasing impact in global education.
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Over the past two years, the Center for Education Innovations worked with UNICEF to identify five innovative programs and provide critical support to them for strengthening and scaling up their models. At the same time, we documented their journey, including challenges confronted and conditions that helped lead to success. Insights gained from each program’s journey were synthesized and they have yielded concrete recommendations for implementers (program managers), donors, policymakers and researchers to support innovation. These findings will be shared in the #JourneysToScale report launching on Monday, 10 October.
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This year’s Global Education Monitoring Report made explicit what many have known for some time: maintaining the status quo will leave the world woefully behind its stated education targets.
Current efforts and commitments must be increased, but fresh approaches that transform the current calculus are also needed.
To answer the call for identifying and supporting effective innovations, CEI and UNICEF embarked on a comprehensive search and selection of promising ideas and practices in education through the Innovations in Education Global Initiative.
The resulting report, Journeys to Scale, documents these innovations’ efforts to increase their impact, and includes lessons learned on the great (and sometimes bumpy) journey to scale up programs with high disruption potential.
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Over the next three days, stakeholders committed to advancing the social and economic well-being of young people will convene at the Global Youth Economic Opportunities (YEO) Summit. The Summit, now in its 10th year, seeks to increase awareness of current and emerging innovative approaches that can help youth lead productive, engaged and healthy lives.
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Numerous studies show that books, as part of a coherent reading instructional program, are one of the most cost-effective inputs to improving learning outcomes and that reading books specifically are essential to boosting literacy. Yet, despite decades of efforts by the development sector, country governments, and NGOs, books, particularly in mother tongue languages, are still not easily accessible to children in many countries.
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One year ago I had an inspiring Skype call with Moses Epem, an Outreach Officer for FilmAid. We spoke about the proverb: ‘Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime’, and the critical importance of sustained engagement in education. He asked me to help him raising the educational bar in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, which houses 180.000 refugees and has been in operation since 1992.
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When Tanzanian company ARTI Energy brought solar lights to Kiromo village in the eastern district of Bagamoyo eight years ago, local people were excited but found them expensive.
"I really liked those lamps, but I could not imagine then that I would ever own one," recalled Kiromo resident Salum Ali. -
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Fast moving trends in the fashion industry are nothing new, but women in Pakistan and the greater sub-continent are redefining styles almost every day. Global clients are increasingly looking to the region not only for manufacturing, but for design.
But wait, what does this have to do with the Pakistan education crisis?
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CEI is excited to announce that our Early Learning Toolkit has expanded to meet the ever-shifting challenges that education practitioners face: new additions include a French language toolkit, and an Early Childhood Strategies Hub. Take a look at some of our favorite features here.
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The Center for Education Innovations (CEI) Program Database, which profiles more than 700 innovative education projects around the world in low and middle-income countries, continues to grow and change in response to the ever-shifting needs of the international development landscape. We are excited to introduce five recent additions to our Database.
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Last week, Project Hello World was invited to a google hangout panel discussion addressing the question of how digital resources are making an impact in the context of development work. The panel was co-hosted by the Center for Education Innovations (CEI), and the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE).
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Key players in childhood education came together for the first time in West Africa to speak about innovations and new strategies in early stage learning. The conference brought to light some of the challenges facing infantile development in the region and proposed solutions to these problems.
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It’s not surprising that rural youth around the world don’t want to follow well-worn paths into low-return, subsistence agriculture. But does this mean that agriculture programs shouldn’t bother trying to connect with youth, or that youth programs can forget about agriculture as a viable livelihood option?
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There is no greater time to invest than in a child's early years. Early childhood is a unique moment to support a child's physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development and lay the foundation for later health, educational, and economic outcomes. Now, as the evidence supporting the importance of early childhood development mounts, practitioners and policy-makers alike are no longer debating whether ECD interventions work, but how to make them work better.
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The Early Learning Toolkit, housed within Results for Development’s Center for Education Innovations, provides users with actionable resources and information to improve the quality of early learning. In addition to strategies for improving learning in primary grades and program management, next week the Early Learning Toolkit will launch four new strategies that target early childhood programs.
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The recently adopted SDGs send a clear message: learning begins at birth and continues beyond any single grade-level or graduation. With international attention now more focused on promoting lifelong learning, passionate practitioners from the classroom to the boardroom and even social media are asking: what is lifelong learning, and what does it look like in practice?
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Last year, 13 year-old Josephine Nyakundi was interviewing for a scholarship from an elite private high school in the United States.
“What will you contribute to our school?" the interviewer asked politely.
“One day," Josephine replied. ”I hope to become a world-renowned neurologist." And," she added with a smile, "then you can say that I went to your school!” -
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The last few years have seen a proliferation of analyses that aim to help practitioners decide whether programs should scale, and to identify those factors that enable successful scaling. And while less has been written about scaling education programs than in other sectors, this is increasingly no longer the case.
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The recent Delhi launch of the British Council’s ‘teaching for success’ initiative in brought together both meta-analysis of what constitutes a relevant 21st century education and offered a nested conceptual model providing practical guidance for both teachers and teacher educators in delivering on this.
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A blog I posted on April 27th on NORRAG NEWSbite reflected on the massively increased funding that sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) will need, compared to other regions, to reach the 2030 education Sustainable Development Goal (SDG4), and the danger that the recent economic slowdown could severely affect countries’ ability to mobilize the resources required. The two main reasons for this higher resource need are SSA’s massive needs for education catch-up and rapid population growth.
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Many children around the word still spend too much of their time in classrooms memorizing and repeating phrases without true exploration or passion. This reliance on rote-learning methods is a major contributor to the global learning crisis, and innovators around the world are working to inject creativity and flexibility into education. These efforts are manifesting themselves inside schools and through the curriculum-design process, but many non-school based interventions are working to make a more immediate impact.
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What if by developing children’s social and emotional capacities, we can more effectively improve their literacy skills, numeracy skills, and future livelihoods? While there has been much attention in the education field on improving children’s literacy and numeracy skills, less attention has been given to children’s social and emotional learning.
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In a world where so many of our interactions and experiences occur virtually, whether it’s a workday filled with emails and webinars, or an evening spent exchanging text messages about your favorite TV show, there is something energizing about unplugging and connecting with colleagues face-to-face.
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There is not enough evidence about the specific critical and cost-effective actions needed to improve child care quality in Latin America. In contrast with sectors such as primary education, in which the region has invested significant effort in collecting indicators on teacher quality, resources in schools, and levels of student learning (PISA), governments still lack systematized and reliable information about child care services. If these data were available, what would we use it for?
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When it comes to developing entrepreneurship skills, practice makes perfect. Nothing can teach business skills quite like setting a goal, making a plan and seeing the idea through from start to finish. But too many children do not receive this experience before entering the workforce.
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For 3 years New Education Highway handed out laptops containing a vast wealth of information as though they were pieces of candy to be chewed over and spat away.
The content was impressive, but the problem we encountered was that no-one really knew how to use this material to teach. -
Somewhere in a village in Nigeria, a young girl is sitting in school today, just like she does every day, packed onto a crowded wooden bench in a faded school uniform. She represents a victory in the global effort to get all children learning, and her presence will be recorded as progress in the global databases maintained by UNESCO and the World Bank.
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This blog, by Birger Fredriksen, a leading expert on the development of education in developing countries at the Results for Development Institute, shows that concerted efforts are needed to stop the economic slowdown in sub-Saharan Africa from impacting on its education 2030 ambitions. It is released to coincide with the Global Action Week run by the Global Campaign for Education, under the theme ‘Fund the Future: Education Rights Now!”
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Recent debate surrounding the Heckman Equation reveals insights into how Early Childhood Development (ECD) programs can help children develop invaluable skills needed for happy, productive adulthood. So what are these skills and what can ECD programs do to help children build them?
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When a workshop’s official proceedings have come to close, and those in attendance continue to engage with each other, excitedly making plans for future collaboration, you know you’ve had a special day.
This was the case at last Thursday’s Early Learning Toolkit Workshop,co-hosted by CEI and Bangalore-based Catalyst Management Services (CMS), at the India International Centre in New Delhi. -
Scaling up innovations to improve outcomes and increase impact is a topic of growing interest to education practitioners, funders, and researchers, as well as to the broader development community. Below, Larry Cooley considers the tools available for assessing innovations’ scaling potential, and discusses the role of such tools in informing program design and evaluating readiness to scale. He offers several recommendations on how to think about scale.
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As a young teacher, I was constantly looking to my more experienced colleagues for tips and tools. I shamelessly begged and borrowed —there was no need to recreate the wheel every day: savvy veteran teachers had developed approaches to teaching 7th grade Math that I could simply tweak to make my own.
Take targeted instruction, for instance. Targeted instruction just means using different teaching methods and exercises for different students based on their ability levels and interests. I knew from my training that targeted instruction was key to making sure that all my students were learning, but I needed more than that general advice: what exactly should I do, tomorrow, to make it happen? How should I group students? How would I give different sets of instructions to each group? Where would the groups sit? What would each group do, and how should I divide my time in supporting the groups?
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When you were a child, did you ever attend a summer camp? What about a field trip to a local museum, or a regional student competition? Very likely, the answer to at least one of these questions is yes. However, many classrooms in low and middle-income countries aren't equipped with basic learning and teaching materials, so extracurricular activities like the ones described are considered extravagances that would only be possible in the distant future. Nevertheless, some innovative educators are rejecting this dichotomy, and fostering life skills outside the classroom.
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India makes my point. So do Bangladesh and China and Turkey and Colombia and the Democratic Republic of Congo and Malaysia.
The leaders of these other countries know — sometimes better than we do — that their very future depends on investment in early education. They understand that emphasis must begin before birth, concentrating especially on the first several years (85 percent of brain growth occurring by age 3). -
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The Center for Health Market Innovations has released its latest annual report - Highlights: Findings from 2015. This year’s report features 70 programs using a range of innovative models to deliver better and more affordable healthcare to the world’s poor. With new findings on innovative approaches to program management, funding models, adaptive-learning strategies and more, this report has relevant insights not just for those in the health field, but for practitioners in the education sector and broader international development communities as well.
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Millions of children grow up in Metro Manila, a vibrant, rapidly changing urban environment with much to explore and experience. But there are challenges that come with living in a city of more than 15 million people. At TULA Philippines, an innovative chain of after-school learning centers, we see those challenges as opportunities and have developed a new approach to learning after school.
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There is an estimated annual financing gap of US$39 billion between current spending and what will be needed to reach quality universal education goals by 2030. An array of new funding mechanisms are striving to bridge this gap, and now more organizations are asking: Can social impact bonds help us scale up effectively?
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Many of the girls supported by the Girls’ Education Challenge are about to become women. The kind of women they will become and the lives that they will lead will be largely dictated by the lives of the women around them – their mothers, aunts and grandmothers. For many, this risks impoverishment, early marriage and pregnancy, and a life of service to their families and communities.
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Today, we celebrate the book. It might be a book full of words and pictures, or it might be full of clean empty pages. Either way, a book that can fit in a pocket or a small bag, together with the ability to read those words or fill those pages, gives the owner a freedom and power that few other items can give.
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Teachers in many countries, including the US, can visit a wide range of websites to find teaching resources and tools that support them in designing lessons, teaching students, and assessing progress. However, for educators in many developing countries, finding these kinds of resources is much more difficult.
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Governments and donors spend billions on education in low and middle income countries each year but the link between this spending and outcomes – i.e., ensuring all children are in school and learning – is too often unclear. Numerous studies have shown that children leave school without basic skills and that increased funding for education does not necessarily lead to better outcomes.
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Asia Education Summit in Bangkok
Early gains after 2000 have been reversed in recent years, and the number of out-of-school children around the world is once again growing. 2016 will be a critical year in regaining progress, and discussions continue this week in Bangkok, where Results for Development experts Nick Burnett and Tara Hill will present on possible solutions at the 2016 Asia Education Summit.
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As a global community, we are still grappling with how best to drive improvements in education outcomes. Despite the substantial progress made over the past decade, the Sustainable Development Goals launched last year were also a sobering reminder of the distance yet to travel when it comes to fulfilling the promise of quality education for all.
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There is an increased emphasis on the quality of education in the international development community that is clearly desirable. One need only compare the topline education goal from the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) to that of the newly adopted Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) for education to see this shift in action. This shift is deserved and needed. But in 2013 there were still 124 million children and adolescents out of school, and a renewed focus on quality cannot obscure the basic needs that these children still face.
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For the 30th time since formal adoption in 1986, America paused on the third Monday in January to reflect on the impact of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The struggle for social justice has outlived Dr. King, but it has also been irrevocably shaped by his commitment to peaceful change. Dr. King’s legacy continues in the United States, but there are also educators all around the world building upon MLK’s legacy of peace to continue bending the moral arc of justice in the right direction.
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When I met Esperance in Gitarama, Rwanda in September, her children had just arrived home from school. She proudly boasted that all of her seven children had finished primary school. When Esperance enrolled in the FXBVillage program, she was struggling with extreme poverty. The financial support Esperance received during the first year covered her children’s educational expenses, nutritional needs and necessary medical attention.
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Thanks to a diet of cuisine based TV programmes – even the least epicurean will be aware that while good ingredients are critical – gastronomic success comes through artful combinations, the process through which they are brought together and the sequence in which they are served. Reading across to education, it was refreshing to be on the panel at the recent launch by Dr.
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There is a unique energy that fills a room when a group of passionate, informed young people gather together to discuss their plans for social innovation. This was the case when Results for Development (R4D) and the Center for Education Innovations (CEI) hosted recent graduates of the African Leadership Academy (ALA) for a workshop on African Youth Economic Opportunity. These students have experienced the benefits of effective skills development initiatives directly, and met on Friday to learn more about using their own experiences to inform youth-skills interventions of the future.
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This summer in Addis Ababa, 12 organizations including the World Bank Group launched a call for increased innovation in international development to solve the world’s most complex challenges, including the new sustainable development goals. There is a need to invest in new technologies and innovations that have the potential to deliver both social impact and economic returns. One of the ways the Bank Group is tackling this challenge is through “innovation labs” that help integrate emerging innovations into our work.
We’ve had a lot of questions about how we define and integrate innovation in a large institution. Here are some answers: -
2015 was an eventful, sometimes paradoxical, year in global education. The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals were formally adopted, including a commitment to equitable and quality education for all by 2030. Yet millions of children were also driven from their homes and schools as refugee crises struck regions around the world. No one yet knows what 2016 will bring to the education landscape, but it is clear that many of the previous year's issues will continue to be important. With that in mind, I invite you to look back at the ten most popular CEI blog posts from the last 12 months. The list shows not only which issues resonated most among our community in 2015, but also sheds light on the issues that will be significant in the coming year as well.
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A magic set and an ice-cream maker are apparently on their way to the top of my eight-year-old’s Christmas wish list and she has been agonising over whether throwing this critical document to the flames of a bonfire is the most effective way to ensure delivery.
The new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been celebrated by some and ‘bah-humbugged’ by others. The newer and more diverse version of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) consist of 169 targets (as opposed to the 18 MDG targets). But one of the more interesting things about these goals is how they will be delivered – not through a bonfire, but via the world’s private sector.
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CEI’s value comes largely from our audience and user-base of practitioners, funders, policymakers, and education advocates, and we have exciting plans to continue serving our committed network in the coming year. But it is also important to take this opportunity to reflect on all of the great work we have done together.
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I recently returned from a visit to a Camfed project in Zambia funded by the Girls’ Education Challenge: “Child-centred schooling: Innovation for the improvement of learning outcomes for marginalised girls in Zambia”. My initial interest in this was as a model for teacher training, but for anyone that knows about Escuela Nueva, it is much more than this.
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As world leaders meet in Paris to discuss global action on climate change, Senior Education Advisor for the UK Department for International Development in India Colin Bangay explores the connection between education and global warming. Bangay, who is also a member of CEI’s Advisory Council, examines how education initiatives can spur the technological innovation and behavioral change that will be crucial to stemming climate change.
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With a new World Bank report warning climate change could push more than 100 million additional people back into poverty by 2030 it is timely that the new ‘global goals’ (aka; sustainable development goals – SDG’s) put education in the front line for both protecting the livelihoods of future generations while addressing the poverty challenge of today. While climate change presents significant challenges to education – education also provides a powerful means through which to respond.
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Today, Early Childhood Development (ECD) is recognized as one of the most important and cost effective interventions in the life of a child. A vast body of evidence from neurobiology, developmental psychology, and economics have highlighted the importance of intervening early in a child’s life, with better child and adult socio-economic outcomes including improved school completion rates, reduced crime rates, and higher earnings.
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The effectiveness of funding to Afghanistan’s education sector has recently been called into question through an open letter issued by the US Special Investigator General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). That letter was preceded by a statement by the new Afghan Minister of Education to parliament where he questioned the authenticity of the records kept by the previous administration; in reality, according to Buzzfeed, there were around 7% fewer schools and teachers than were being reported and donors were paying for. The accusations will rightly lead to legitimate demands for improved openness and transparency in the education sector.
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Too many children today are not given the chance to fully explore their own curiosity, and girls especially are constrained. More than 100 million girls around the world are involved in child labor. Despite recent gains, millions more girls than boys remain out of school entirely.
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Education systems are not keeping up with fast-changing global economies, and in advanced and developing countries alike students are not being prepared for the modern workforce. This "skills gap" was the focus for this year's World Innovation Summit of Education (WISE), an event that brings together thousands of leading education experts and policymakers.
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I recently visited a Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC) project ‘Valorisation de la Scolarisation des Filles’ working in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The project is led by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to get the most marginalised girls, across nearly 400 schools in five provinces, into school and learning.
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American colleges and universities are enrolling unprecedented amounts of international students. Faculty and teachers are integrating more global perspectives, cross cultural communication skills, and international histories in and out of the classroom. In an increasingly interconnected world, these institutions are realizing the need to internationalize higher education.
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Girls with disabilities are often marginalised, shunned and hidden away at home. Some are even abused by people close to them. I recently visited a project in Kenya, run by Leonard Cheshire Disability and supported by the Girls’ Education Challenge, which aims to help girls with disabilities integrate better into society and go to school and learn.
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Researchers and practitioners agree that play is an important tool for children's learning and development. Play impacts large muscle and fine motor skills development in children, affects language acquisition and literacy, along with reducing stress. Learning through play could help children gain skills like creativity, improve self-esteem, teach children how to work in teams, interact socially, and problem solve. Some interventions to increase play-based interaction between parents and children early in life have shown to have an effect on IQ, educational attainment, employment and earnings later in life.
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Meenu is 21, she is a teacher at JGM Public School – a primary school in Khajuri, East Delhi. She is one of the 12,000 teachers whose work is being recognized and shared within Changemaker Teacher Networks to influence millions of existing teachers in India into re-thinking their role in shaping our society and the world.
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Our modern era has inspired us to find new ways to incorporate technology and the availability of instant information into every aspect of our lives. Technology’s role in education cannot be undervalued as policymakers, educators, and researchers reevaluate the needs of students in the 21st century.
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This year’s WISE Awards have been announced, and CEI is thrilled that four programs profiled in our extensive database have been recognized for this prestigious honor. WISE, or the World Innovation Summit for Education was founded in 2009. Since then, each year WISE has selected 6 successful innovations responding to critical education challenges around the world.
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Today, more children than ever before are enrolled in school. Yet many of them are not learning the skills they need to achieve their dreams. For example, in India, enrollment levels are 96% or higher for children aged 6-14, yet reading levels remain low. Here at CEI we feature over 120 programs using a host of innovative models and strategies to improve learning outcomes for India’s children, and nearly a quarter of them are leveraging new technologies to ensure that students in class are actually learning.
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The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — an inter-governmentally agreed set of goals relating to international progress, ranging from ending poverty, violence and hunger to improving gender equity, jobs, energy, health and education—serve as a roadmap for the future. There’s one particular goal within the most recent set of SDGs that has drawn attention from an unlikely source: Business leaders.
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An adolescent girl, sitting on the cusp of womanhood, faces a period of disorientation. Sudden physical changes, peer pressure and decision-making that can impact her whole future can be overwhelming and bewildering. However, it can also be a time of excitement and independence. A time to question authority, test the boundaries and determine her identity. Armed with the right tools and skills during this period, she can step into womanhood with self-confidence and ambition.
Education is one of these tools. Indeed, education can be the most important weapon in an adolescent girls’ armoury. The ability to read and write, add and subtract, be creative, use technology and know about the world beyond her home and community can open up a world of opportunity and help develop the self-esteem and ambition needed to turn opportunities into reality.
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An added benefit to my work at the Center for Education Innovations (CEI) are the hopeful vignettes I get to see from our relationships with committed educators around the world. This World Teachers' Day, it is important to remember that teachers are not just inputs, and not some monolithic group. They are passionate individuals using kindness and skill to move our world forward one student at a time.
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It seems impossible not to begin a blog piece this week without acknowledging first the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations, and for good reason. In addition to the commemorations and reviews, many are looking at the cross-sector relationships among the SDGs and targets.
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Late last week, world leaders met to adopt ambitious new sustainable development goals (SDGs) that will shape international development for the next 15 years. There is a great deal of optimism surrounding the new agenda. Yet it is almost certain that the SDGs will fail if equally ambitious and innovative financing strategies such as debt and loan buy-downs are not adopted. This is especially true for education – a sector that has been slow to capitalize on the growth of alternative sources of finance.
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A quarter of a century after global education leaders met in Jomtien, Thailand, and boldly announced that “Learning begins at birth”, it is reassuring to see that early learning now features more prominently on the global development agenda. The inclusion of early learning in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals through 2030 is an important accomplishment, and reflects the widespread evidence from low- and high- resource contexts alike of the importance of nurturing children’s development, care and education well before they begin formal schooling.
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The Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship, in partnership with the Center for Education Innovations, has just published the first ever South African Education Innovator’s Review. This review, based on the Bertha Centre's work over the last three years, shines a spotlight on the sometimes under-recognised role that frontline actors can play in systemic change in education, and the hope that lies in the all-too-often untold narrative of their positive work.
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Citizen-led assessments (CLAs) emerged in India in 2005 as a way to raise awareness and advocacy around low learning levels, and to act as a force for bottom-up accountability and action that would improve education quality and learning. Thousands of volunteers traveled to rural districts and administered simple reading and math tests to the children in households they visited. The dismal results, published in the 2005 Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), helped stimulate debate and prioritize learning in national policy.
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Project Hello World launched in Nigeria in 2013 to provide isolated and vulnerable communities in Sub-Saharan Africa with educational content and Internet access through outdoor solar-powered and Internet-enabled computer stations, the Hello Hubs. The innovative program's success has come largely from its focus on empowering local community members to install, maintain, and train these technological hubs. To learn more about their operations, we spoke with Projects for All Founder Katrin Macmillan.
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September marks the return to school for students around the world, but it is also the month when global leaders will meet to formally adopt the Sustainable Development Goals, and set the course for the international development framework through 2030. Recognizing this critical juncture, Results for Development (R4D) was excited to celebrate the Bernard van Leer Foundation’s (BvLF) 50 years of work in early childhood development (ECD) with the inaugural event at R4D’s new offices, Early Childhood Matters.
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The world’s attention has been fixed on Europe as thousands of refugees stream into the continent each day, many of them desperate, tired and weak from their dangerous journeys. In the short term, this influx could be seen as a burden for Europe, but in the long term, they could present an important economic opportunity.
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September 8th marks International Literacy Day, a day dedicated to celebrating the importance of reading, and more importantly, raising awareness of the need for global literacy. Given the emphasis placed on literacy over the years, it is perhaps surprising that in 2015 there is still a need to draw attention to this critical issue. So where does global literacy stand in 2015?
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Last month, at the United Nations compound in Nairobi, Kenya, President Obama spoke to an audience of business innovators from 120 countries at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit. He spoke there about “the spirit of entrepreneurship” rising in Africa. Dedicated educators across the continent are putting Mr. Obama’s words into practice, by equipping Africa’s next generations of young entrepreneurs with the skills they need to succeed in this burgeoning climate of private sector led growth.
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In recent years, Latin American and Caribbean nations have accomplished across-the-board reductions in poverty and, in many cases, impressive growth rates. These positive trends have allowed for increased spending on education, but cannot obscure the huge challenges still faced by the region in this area.
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As a UNESCO (2012) think piece on education and skills beyond 2015 predicted, there will be a shift in education, away from a focus on teaching in a classroom to an increased focus on learning, which happens both formally and informally throughout the day. This concept of a learning experience that spans institutional and home settings, where both information and learner are untethered from fixed time and space teaching, is enabled by mobile technology.
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In 2014, 201 million people were unemployed globally. This year, the ILO expects that figure to rise by 3 million. Young people are most affected: there are 74 million people between 15 and 24 who were seeking work in 2014. Yet, juxtaposed against this, the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that by 2030 there may be a shortage of nearly 45 million medium skilled workers in developing countries.
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Latin America's education systems are facing major challenges. Higher education remains off-limits to all but a small minority, and better early childhood education is desperately needed, given how our most fundamental cognitive skills develop in the first years of life. And the region is beset by poor quality schools at all levels, especially for vulnerable individuals in low-income communities.
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“It is not a lack of resources that holds back change in schools; it is a lack of imagination,” wrote University of Free State Vice-Chancellor and well-know education commentator Jonathan Jansen in the foreword of the 14th edition of The Trialogue CSI Handbook. “Business” he urges, “use your drive for excellence and innovation to help turn education around.”
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Coordinating investments is a challenge all funders face. How do we avoid duplicating investments in some areas while other areas are overlooked and underfunded? How do we identify potential synergies and opportunities to collaborate with others who have similar interests, and align our investments to be more impactful? As the range of actors investing in early childhood development (ECD) in East Africa grows, so does the challenge of understanding who is investing in what, and where.
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The application of innovative models in international development has captured the attention of program implementers, funders, researchers and policymakers alike. Numerous innovations have been conceived and launched, however, there are many obstacles to identifying and accelerating the spread of innovative policies and practices that improve the lives of the poor.
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Bringing ICT into rural Kenyan classrooms has been challenging. Shipping and installing equipment has been time consuming. Reaching remote schools during the rains has been difficult. Project staff even had to work out how to stop ants moving into a server at one point. But the Girls’ Education Challenge iMlango project has successfully managed to put in place the three Cs of Connectivity, Content and Capacity.
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For many people, the use of technology in education constitutes a de facto 'innovation'. Whether or not this belief is actually accurate, or useful, is a legitimate question for discussion. That said, there is no denying that many of the educational innovations celebrated (or at least touted) today are enabled by the use of such technologies in some way.
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The performance of the South African schooling system has been extremely poor. Teachers are believed to be one of the key drivers behind South Africa’s weak education performance, with many arguing that low levels of teacher effort play a greater role than low levels of teacher skill.
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More than 130 programs in the CEI database aim to tackle the issue of youth unemployment in low- and middle-income countries by equipping teenagers and young adults with the training and skills necessary to enter the workforce. Many deliver general skills training to ease transition into any field of work; some prepare youth for a particular trade; others provide guidance and mentoring to ensure young people have adequate support in their professional endeavors. The skills for work portal allows users to explore these trends and more.
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If you grew up in Pakistan in the 90s, you may have heard your parents share tales of the ‘glorious’ years when all children attended government schools and graduated with a ‘high quality’ education. Our parents would fondly recount a nostalgic era, where the level of education in government schools was comparable to the elite private schools of the country. Unsurprisingly, most of these claims were based on anecdotes and a few inspiring success stories.
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The anticipated inclusion of a goal addressing learning outcomes in the soon-to-be announced 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) underscores a growing global awareness of the importance not only of ensuring that children are in school, but that they are learning. This shift from a focus on access to quality is one that is increasingly important given that billions of dollars in financial resources are pumped into increasing education places in developing countries, without commensurate returns in the literacy and numeracy levels of children.
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Global leaders in the field of Education Technology will meet this fall for the 5th Annual mEducation Alliance Symposium (Oct28-30). The convening’s theme will be Leveraging Information and Communication Technologies for Supporting Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the major tracks for the Symposium will be Promoting Learning; Education in Crisis and Conflict Settings; Alternative Education Models; and Lifelong Learning.
Clearly these issues are, and will continue to be, of the utmost importance to the global development community. We know that many of our programs have unique experience with exactly these questions, and are urging our community to respond to mEducation’s call for presentation proposals before the August 21st deadline.
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I left South Sudan in 1989. The families of some of those whom I met on my visit last month started their journey out of South Sudan around then too. But, unlike me, they have since travelled far and seen much that has etched unreadable lines alongside the tribal scarification on their faces. Many of them are living in Kakuma refugee camp in Turkana Kenya - for the second time - after the resurgence of fighting in Southern Sudan.
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As the international education community puts increased emphasis on the Sustainable Development Goals, information on what works in education is more valuable than ever. Over a hundred of CEI’s featured programs have already submitted updates for CEI Plus, with more expected in the coming months. These programs are providing invaluable information on their efforts to increase access to quality education, while at the same time continuing to make significant impacts on children’s lives around the world.
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Margaret is in Standard 7. She had previously studied in Uganda when her parents fled from South Sudan and had completed Form 2. She had been awarded certificates that proved what a diligent student she was. Her return to South Sudan meant that she didn't complete secondary school, but she married and had two children. Then the fighting started again.
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In the ongoing conversation of the post-2015 education agenda, Malala has been a strong and relentless voice for girls’ education and in reminding us that all children deserve a complete, quality education beyond primary. As adoption of the post-2015 framework for global development nears, Results for Development, the Center for Education Innovations’ parent organization, had the pleasure of working with Malala and the Malala Fund on a technical paper on costing and financing upper secondary education, which was used to inform potential solutions presented by Malala and her organization.
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Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa, with a population of over 166.2 million, most of whom live below two dollars a day. The sheer size of the country’s population presents both risk and opportunity – the risk that state failure and a disenfranchised citizenry could lead to a major humanitarian catastrophe in sub-Saharan Africa, and the opportunity to harness the vast human resource potential to bolster the development of the country and continent. Education is pivotal in achieving the latter scenario for the nation; however the Nigerian education sector is widely viewed to currently be in crisis.
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The international community has made a commitment to every boy and girl across the world. Goal 4 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) calls for access to early childhood education and the completion of free, equitable, and quality primary and secondary education for every child. However, there are uncertainties around how to mobilize additional financing for upper secondary education, and how to mitigate against negative impacts a focus on fee-free upper secondary education could have on the quality and equity at lower levels of education.
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Learner-centred pedagogy is by no means new, it has roots amongst philosophers of the early 1900s; for instance, Jean Piaget asserted that knowledge is constructed through experience and similarly John Dewey claimed that learning is attained by doing. Since then, these concepts have developed and a focus on interaction as a key tool for education has been adopted in many classrooms. In Kenya this approach has not yet been fully realised in practice, but reform efforts are now underway.
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We at Results for Development (R4D) are excited to share with you a new way of thinking about how to approach the adaptation of innovation and facilitate the spread of promising practices to improve the lives of the poor around the world. Through our extensive work in health, education, and broader development, we have become keenly aware of the need for new approaches that create system-level change and diffuse promising components of program models beyond what we can accomplish by scaling one or two organizations.
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This post was originally published on the Huffington Post.
Higher education is becoming a must to succeed in the 21st century labor market. Research has shown that not only do individuals with higher degrees - from community colleges, technical training programs, or traditional universities - make hundreds of thousands more in salary over their working lives, but also enjoy greater social mobility, longer life expectancy, and myriad other benefits.
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21st century jobs increasingly require more developed skills in creativity, imagination, and innovation. Developing these traits among students is a critical challenge for emerging market economies across the globe, and arts-based education delivery methods have shown promise in helping to meet this new demand.
Arts-based learning can leverage a variety of creative activities to benefit cognitive, social, and marketable life-skills development. These activities can be centered around music, drawing, theater, creative writing, and much more. In fact, the diversity of activities within the sphere of artful learning may be one of its biggest strengths.
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The name of our coalition, Elimu Yetu, means ‘Our Education’ in Swahili. This name was chosen to remind us every day why it is important not only to achieve inclusive, quality and free public education for all citizens in Kenya, but also to ensure our voice is heard when realizing this right.
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This post was originally published on the Huffington Post
For many, Latin America is associated with a laundry list of negatives: drugs, corruption, gang violence and transnational crime. However, our new report Harnessing Social Impact Investing in Latin America, helps to dispel some of these myths. In fact, in the realm of social impact investing, it is on the forefront of rapidly-changing global trends.
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Football, or soccer, is about the love of a game. The ball bounces unpredictably, and millions of us chase after it with joy and skill.
Despite recent controversy at its governing body - FIFA, football at its core is still a beautiful game. It provides an opening that is especially hard to create in many of the world’s most challenging communities. Bonds over the sport are strong, and are setting the foundation for a diverse number of education services and programs.
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As the Fund Manager for the Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC), we are extremely limited in our ability to visit field project locations in Afghanistan. It is designated as too ‘high risk’. For this reason, we held our recent Annual Review workshop with project teams in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo. These teams have similar issues in visiting some of their project sites in districts outside the Afghan capital. Security is a daily concern. Our monitors also have difficulties in visiting and increasingly we need to rely on data and information which is difficult to verify.
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With the launch of CEI Plus, information on more than 600 programs featured in our community has never been easier to assess and share. Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is incredibly important for increasing transparency and knowledge of what works in education. With the new CEI Dashboard, featured programs demonstrate their commitment to information sharing and vital evaluations with the new Results Badge and M&E Reporting Checkmarks. Practitioners, policymakers, and funders can now quickly discover how active the CEI community is in sharing and building upon results. We are excited to see how programs leverage this increased collaboration, so that future innovations continue to increase their effectiveness.
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With the support of the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC) is supporting 37 projects working in 18 countries. On a recent trip to Uganda, I had the opportunity to see six of these projects (listed below) in action. There were a few insights that struck me: