To achieve our ambitious agenda, we work across three transformations; Education Workforce, System Delivery and School Health and Nutrition.
The Education Workforce Initiative (EWI) is a crucial pillar of achieving LGI’s mission, EWI’s vision is for all countries to have a strong education workforce that is designed and supported to collaborate with each other and those outside the education system to achieve learning for all.
© Education Development Trust
Evidence has shown that the education workforce is the heart of every education system, and within schools, teachers have the biggest impact on learning outcomes. They are the frontline professionals working directly with students day-to-day and implementing national policy and interventions. Recent projections estimate that there are still an additional 44 million teachers needed globally by 2030. However, increasing the supply of teachers alone will not be enough, they need to be trained and professionally supported and developed and besides, they are not solely responsible for education – there is a wide range of existing roles that support teachers and students, including school leaders, education support personnel, district officials, health care professionals, caregivers and community members. Emerging evidence points to the positive impact of other roles working collaboratively to support teachers and students. Now is the time to harness the entire education workforce to catalyze a learning generation.
Since then, EWI has continued to work closely with countries, drawing on the latest research and testing new approaches to strengthen and empower the education workforce.
In Sierra Leone, we have been supporting the Teaching Service Commission (TSC) to improve teacher deployment by analyzing GIS data and undertaking research on teacher preferences. Last year, we co-designed a system-wide school leadership program with the TSC, Education Development Trust, Fab Inc and EducAid that is now being implemented at scale at secondary level.
In Ghana, together with PwC Ghana, we worked with the government to re-design the Ghana Education Service organization structure from school to national level. Over the past year, we have been working as a learning partner on the implementation phase of this pioneering system reform. Working with Research Trust Limited, we led the first learning cycle, capturing key lessons that have informed adaptation of the implementation. We will continue to lead learning cycles and undertake research throughout the implementation.
In Rwanda, Ghana and Kenya, we worked with governments and national partners to create greater awareness, political will, and action toward adopting adaptive, inclusive, engaging, and playful pedagogies, this resulted in this policy brief and country action plans that are now in the process of being taken forward. Our prototype High Touch High Tech approach of personalized, adaptive and active learning in Vietnam for grade 7 maths students led to 2 years of learning in 1 semester.
Building on the work EWI has done to date, we will continue to focus on these three objectives:
Improve the supply and quality of teaching for the most marginalized
Advance the use of the learning team approach
Looking to the future, we aim to pioneer system-embedded learning team approaches for foundational learning in collaboration with new countries. At both the school and system leadership levels, our efforts will concentrate on enhancing leadership effectiveness, with a particular emphasis on promoting gender inclusivity and foundational learning. Building on successful initiatives in Sierra Leone, we hope to extend equitable teacher allocation strategies to other countries.
Evidence shows that governments have ambitious reform agendas to provide education for all, but implementation is lagging with low learning traps often related to delivery challenges (WDR, 2018). A focus on system delivery is essential to ensure that policies and effective reforms and interventions are implemented throughout the system and at the school and class level to improve learning. The System Delivery transformation goal is that governments and education systems improve delivery through better prioritization, use of data, and problem-solving to achieve learning for all.
© Ariel D. Javellana
Implementing reforms to achieve learning and efficiently deliver results for education is a global education issue. Improving system delivery will help make progress on LGI’s mission because:
More and more countries have used delivery units or approaches to achieve better outcomes for policy reform and implementation. There was, however, little empirical evidence on the effectiveness of them in delivering education outcomes or on the design choices, contextual features, and enabling factors that contribute to the performance of these delivery approaches. DeliverEd was launched in 2019 by the Education Commission (EC) to strengthen the evidence base on how governments can achieve their policy priorities. Four years of research was conducted on delivery approaches with the Blavatnik School of Government (BSG) at University of Oxford within and across countries (Ghana, Jordan, Pakistan, Sierra Leone and Tanzania) on the effectiveness of delivery approaches in improving reform implementation.
DeliverEd developed a conceptual framework for delivery approaches, providing a clear definition and pinpointing common design features to the “Conceptual framework on Delivery Approaches to improving policy implementation” and “A Global Mapping of Delivery Approaches” paper and interactive virtual map presenting a detailed analysis of 152 instances of delivery approaches used across 80 different countries. DeliverEd developed a series of research products as well as three Policy Briefs. Nine working papers have been published and three papers have been accepted for publication in academic journals.
The system delivery transformation builds upon the work done under DeliverEd and we are now focusing on two important areas that emerged from that research that are in high demand or under researched.
We will work with countries and support governments to:
The aim of the School Health and Nutrition transformation is that school health and nutrition programs are considered key transforming platforms and receive more domestic and international financing by 2030. Our goal is for governments to prioritize investments in school health and nutrition to advance equitable access to education and learning for all.
© Erly Tatontos / World Bank
As financial pressures on governments mount, there is a danger that school feeding programs will not reach those who need them the most. That would represent a major setback for the SDGs. An expansion of school feeding programs could help accelerate progress in education, nutrition, child health, social protection, and poverty reduction and rural livelihoods. Financing remains a key bottleneck to expansion. There is therefore now an urgent need to identify sustainable financing opportunities for school meals programs, particularly in the low-and lower-middle-income countries where these programs are most needed.
The Sustainable Financing Initiative (SFI) for School Health and Nutrition, launched in 2022 as part of the School Meals Coalition, aims to address critical financing challenges by partnering with governments and donors to identify multi-year financing opportunities for school feeding programs, focusing on low- and lower-middle-income countries.
In its initial phase (2021-2022), the SFI conducted scoping research on national, donor, international, and private sector financing. The initial findings were summarized in the 2022 research paper “School Meals Programmes and the Education Crisis: A Financial Landscape Analysis” and a Policy Brief, outlining current investments, challenges, and policy solutions. Seven country case-studies (Bangladesh, Benin, Bolivia, Guatemala, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania) provided insights into financing patterns and challenges.
The initiative also developed promising financing options outlined in the Investment Case for School Health and Nutrition paper, contributing to discussions at the Global Education Forum and the UN Transforming Education Summit in 2022. In July 2023, the SFI published the research paper “School meal programmes: A missing link in food systems reform” to advocate for integrating school meals into food systems reform efforts.
Furthermore, the SFI provided finance strategy support to Rwanda in collaboration with WFP and developed a country finance strategy methodology and financing tool for use with other governments, with discussions now underway in six additional countries for 2024.
The SFI goals by 2027 include collaborating with countries to mobilize innovative domestic and donor financing for school feeding while advocating for the broader cross-sectoral benefits of school meals.
Looking ahead, our School Health and Nutrition transformation seeks to broaden its focus beyond financing, conducting research on overlooked aspects of school-based health and nutrition to complement our ongoing efforts in school meals initiatives.
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Service delivery is lagging despite ambitious government reform agendas
– LGI, 2023
