Decades of educational innovations have culminated in many effective strategies in the Global South. These range from how to prepare pre-schoolers in remote communities for primary classes to interventions to help refugee youth complete secondary studies. At the heart of these innovations is Southern-based experience and research, while their successful implementation at scale lies in the strength of connecting evidence with use among Southern-based policymaking circles. This is where the Global Partnership for Education Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (GPE-KIX) comes in. The joint endeavour between GPE and IDRC is helping to inform decision-making in education systems through South-South research and the exchange of learning.

Now in its third year, the people at KIX have learned some important lessons about how to make a difference in strengthening education systems in the Global South. The emerging results are building quality evidence rooted in the priorities of partner countries, mobilizing that knowledge to reach policymakers, and strengthening their capacity to adapt it and put it to use. This is an overview of how several KIX participants are supporting education policy and practice.

Putting evidence to use

The KIX research agenda is driven by demand from GPE partner countries, so emerging findings are designed to be immediately useful for policymakers. However, producing evidence is not enough. KIX positions research within an ecosystem of processes and interventions that facilitate collaboration and learning exchange within and between countries in the Global South.

KIX regional learning exchange hubs support educational stakeholders so they can put new evidence and innovations into practice. This learning journey can involve various methods ranging from webinars that introduce evidence and expertise on priority topics in each region to in-depth professional development opportunities. As this blog describes, weeks-long learning cycles conducted by the Europe, Asia, and Pacific hub extend far beyond workshops about using research in policy to actually involving policymakers in the production of the research. Civil society and government representatives from Vietnam participated in the learning cycle on current skills and continue to share research and explore how to adapt it to the context of curriculum reform in the country.

In the Maldives, national experts are using skills from the learning cycle on improving equitable access to education with geospatial data to identify bottlenecks in providing upper secondary education across the country. Participants from the same learning cycle in Bhutan are using their new knowledge to help identify schools at high risk of flooding and ultimately to improve the safety of students.

Exchanging knowledge on teacher training reform 

In addition to these professional development opportunities, GPE-KIX's regional hubs provide a platform for GPE partner countries to share ideas and solutions. A representative from Niger shared successes in teacher training reform in Central and West African countries with representatives from other countries in the region at the Africa 21 Hub. The hub is supporting countries to build from the lessons shared by Niger, including through national policy dialogue workshops to discuss teacher training in depth — another example of the hubs’ knowledge-chain approach in action.

Similarly, countries in the Latin America and the Caribbean region place the abilities of teachers at the heart of potential solutions for learning outcomes. Coming out of the regional learning exchange, KIX is helping integrate regional and global best practice and evidence into the main teacher training program for the eastern Caribbean.

The 2021–2022 KIX Annual Report showcases how KIX regional hubs and applied research projects work together to support teacher professional development as a key priority for partner countries. This is particularly important as they look to recover learning losses caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which had a devastating impact on education systems.

Emerging findings

KIX also provided a means for countries to learn about one another’s pandemic responses and how to better prepare for future crises. The Observatory on COVID-19 responses in educational systems in Africa released early findings and recommendations to help ensure that learning can continue during similar disruptions.

The Observatory’s research prioritized responses for gender equality. As cases of sexual and gender-based violence rose during the pandemic, the Observatory documented the strategies of different countries to promote children’s wellbeing, such as making helplines available to children, providing positive parenting resources to caregivers, enhancing training for child-friendly counselling, and spreading awareness about gender-based violence and teen pregnancy. The Africa 19 hub has also provided opportunities for countries to exchange pandemic-related experience, such as how to support girls’ return to school, including in cases of adolescent pregnancy.

KIX has been gaining momentum

Innovative solutions to the biggest challenges facing education systems are out there, and policymakers in low- and middle-income countries are committed to addressing these challenges. KIX is helping to bring solutions to the surface, learning how to adapt solutions to scale through demand-driven applied research, and facilitating the exchange of South-South learning and capacity strengthening so ministries of education are equipped to integrate these solutions into their national education systems. The emerging findings and early instances of knowledge uptake outlined here are clear indications that this approach is working.

Learn more on the KIX blog

“COVID-19 has caused the biggest disruption to education we have ever seen,” said Margarita Focas Licht, senior education specialist with the Global Partnership for Education (GPE). “The impacts have not been uniform across or even within countries. Alongside economic and health inequalities, the pandemic has deepened education inequalities.”  

At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, school closures left 1.6 billion children out of school globally.  Over half of these children were from lower-income countries. At a 2021 webinar hosted by the Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (KIX) Observatory on COVID-19 Responses in Educational Systems in Africa, Sarah Anyang Agbor, a commissioner at the African Union (AU), noted that: “In Africa by 6 April 2020, 53 AU Member States had shut down their institutions of learning, leaving 20 million learners out of school at pre-primary level, 100 million at primary, 56 million at secondary and 8 million at tertiary level with no access to teaching and learning.” 

Jane Egau Okou, commissioner for teacher education in Uganda, described the multiple pressures: “As schools scrambled to close quickly in March 2020, teachers were unprepared to continue instruction remotely without training for distance learning, materials and technological support. Parents weren’t prepared for children spending time at home without the means to continue and support their education. And children weren’t prepared to learn on their own.” The situation was confusing for everyone. 

Children from vulnerable groups, such as girls, refugees and those with disabilities, were affected the most. Africa’s education systems, already struggling with gaps and inequalities in education provision, were sorely tested. The pandemic challenged governments to explore “alternative ways of teaching without compromising quality,” said Agbor when she officially launched the KIX Observatory. 

The education crisis galvanized funding partners, governments and education experts on the continent to critically examine the scale and nature of funding to education. Specifically, they wanted to see “whether and how the money spent had supported good quality education outcomes especially for girls and boys, those living with disabilities and disadvantaged groups,” Agbor stated. 

As part of its mission to contribute to knowledge and scholarship on international education, KIX contributed to the fresh debate with the publication of its report Financing Education in Africa during the COVID-19 Pandemic. In April 2021, the KIX Observatory brought KIX stakeholders together in a webinar to discuss the report and its implications — a key function of knowledge exchange that is supported by KIX, which is a joint endeavour between GPE and IDRC. 

COVID-19 was a major shock on a fragile education system

Before the pandemic, “40 percent of children in Africa were considered to have a low-level of well-being, which means they have inadequate access to water, sanitation, nutrition and generally lack space for education,” noted Rita Bisoonauth, head of mission at the AU’s International Centre for the Education of Girls and Women in Africa (CIEFFA). “With COVID-19, the number of children affected has increased and gender inequalities widened, especially during school closures,” she added.

“In spite of significant gains recorded in education, education systems on the continent were already weak,” Bisoonauth stated. “When the crisis hit, development financing shifted to quickly respond to support and strengthen public health systems that were buckling under the pressure from COVID-19.” This shift further weakened already fragile education systems.

Across the world, teaching was taken online to reach children forced to stay at home. In Africa, distance learning that depends exclusively on technology has exacerbated and made visible existing inequalities.

“According to the ITU, 216 million learners in sub-Saharan Africa do not have a household computer and 26 million are not covered by a mobile network,” said Agbor. “In 25 Member States, over 75% lack internet access,” she added.

When schools closed, investments in most countries focused on the following main areas: distance learning, including training teachers how to use the technology needed for it; providing water, sanitation and hygiene materials in readiness for when schools opened; and supporting vulnerable populations, such as children with special needs, girls from marginalized areas and refugee populations.

Rwanda developed a COVID-19 education sector plan in response to the crisis. “We have invested in training of teachers in online teaching and assessment, provided schools with washing stations and building 122,000 new classrooms to decongest schools that are overcrowded,” said Gaspard Twagirayezu, Rwanda’s minister of state for primary and secondary education.

GPE, through its special funding window to support education initiatives in partner countries during the pandemic, mobilized USD500 million (CAD650 million). According to Focas Licht, nearly three quarters of those funds have been prioritized for psychosocial support, hygiene, nutrition, equity including support for re-opening of schools, and planning for resilience.  

The sums are large, but the need is greater

Competing priorities between public health and education spending is putting many governments under immense pressure. The majority of speakers at the KIX webinar agreed that most African countries lack capacity to fulfil the 20% global benchmark on support to education. And all this is happening in an environment “where education spending is likely to stagnate, the gap in annual financing needed to achieve SDG4 is estimated to increase from USD148 billion [CAD192 billion] to USD200 billion [CAD260 billion] and aid to education could fall by up to USD2 billion [CAD2.6 billion] by 2022,” noted Focas Licht.  

How are governments tackling the problem? 

The pandemic placed the majority of families on the continent under economic pressure as they saw their mobility restricted, their jobs disappear and their national economies shrink. According to Agbor, many children, especially young girls, were forced into child labour and early marriages. Findings from KIX research revealed that governments responded to these issues in two ways: with policy instruments and with extra money.

The wave of teenage pregnancies has given impetus to policy revisions to support the readmission of pregnant girls and teenage mothers into school. Zimbabwe has allocated USD123 million (CAD160 million) to revise its Education Act. KIX’s research examined, through a gender lens, how financing is supporting children. ”Of the investments to education efforts in Africa, what went into supporting boys and girls,” asked Maria Mdachi, a gender specialist at CIEFFA.

Research shows that equality in enrolment for boys and girls is generally level at pre and primary school, but the gap widens at secondary and tertiary school levels. “Gender disaggregated data to explain why such changes happen is insufficient or missing altogether,” said Mdachi.  “Yet, better information will contribute to education planning and strategies that take into account barriers to gender equality.”

The AU intensified its efforts to support girls to return to class through ‘AfricaEducateHer,’ a campaign to raise awareness and mobilize resources to get girls back into schools as they reopened. “We were aware that many girls had no chance to return to school due to the pandemic, early marriages and teenage pregnancies,” said Mdachi.

CIEFFA has called for “gender intelligence” as a strategic approach to better address gender equality. The organization Gender Intelligence Group defines gender intelligence as a paradigm shift that focuses on “naturally occurring characteristics that distinguish men and women beyond the obvious biological and cultural, to include attitudinal and behavioral differences.”

“This understanding will contribute to better outcomes for girls through policies that prioritize gender equality and ensure that no one is left behind,” said Mdachi.   

What needs to be done?

To build resilience and quality in education, Africa needs sustained funding and an expansion of domestic revenue to support education initiatives, said Focas Licht. GPE has launched a campaign to mobilize USD5 billion (CAD6.5 billion) in five years to strengthen education systems and to protect gains made in education. The Global Education Summit held in the United Kingdom in 2021 brought together world leaders and the global community to pledge financing to support quality education for all children for the period 2021 to 2025. The summit was part of the ‘Raise Your Hand’ financing campaign launched in October 2020.

Experts at the KIX webinar called on African governments to innovate, tackle inefficiencies and make investments in those areas that matter most and where returns to investment are high, such as early childhood care and education.

Agbor exhorted governments, during the COVID-19 pandemic and in other emergencies, to invest in bridging the digital divide and in green energy. She also encouraged strategic partnerships between finance, energy and infrastructure to set up facilities to support innovations in education. 

Now three years in operation, KIX's unique approach to sharing education innovations in GPE partner countries across the Global South is helping knowledge producers, policymakers and national experts work together to improve the use of evidence in education planning, policy and practice. There are already tangible results. For example, Lesotho’s Ministry of Education and Training used findings from a KIX project, Using data for improving education equity and inclusion, to support the development of a comprehensive national strategy for learning continuity. And in Uganda, the government asked researchers working on a KIX project on data use innovations to scale up a platform connecting health and education information systems to learning institutions.

Capacity strengthening was also a critical area of emerging results. The annual report indicated KIX country representatives (stakeholders from ministries of education, NGOs, teacher-training institutes and others) now have a better understanding of evidence-based solutions to education challenges in their countries and feel more equipped to propose improvements in policy dialogues.

“A lot of this success is being seen in the four regional hubs, which bring together people who work in education systems with national, regional and international researchers,“ said KIX IDRC project leader Tricia Wind. “The hubs are a key part of the KIX design ─ the participation of policymakers from the outset helps researchers best identify and respond to knowledge gaps.”  

That participation is growing. The number of participants in KIX activities nearly quadrupled between April 2021 and March 2022, to nearly 18,000. By the end of that period, 79% of GPE partner countries were showing moderate or high levels of engagement in regional hubs. Hubs and applied research projects are also sharing knowledge through newsletters, blogs, videos, podcasts, policy briefs and other vehicles. 

The usefulness of this stakeholder engagement is reinforced by findings from an independent mid-term evaluation of KIX which took place between September 2021 and March 2022 and identifies capacity strengthening of education stakeholders as the most effective type of support KIX offers. 

“We are pleased that the evaluation concludes that GPE-KIX has made significant progress, is valued by its stakeholders, and is well positioned for impact," stated Naser Faruqui, director of education and science at IDRC, and Margarita Focas-Licht, acting deputy chief executive officer at GPE, in the annual report. “This can be seen in the levels of engagement in regional hubs and their uptake of evidence from applied research, even at the program’s mid-point and during the COVID-19 pandemic.” 

The full report can be read here.

The Knowledge and Innovation Exchange, a joint endeavour between GPE and IDRC, connects expertise, innovation and knowledge to low- and middle-income countries that are building stronger education systems and progressing toward the Sustainable Development Goal of inclusive and equitable quality education for all (SDG 4).