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KIX Europe, Asia, and Pacific hub

 

The Global Partnership for Education Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (KIX), a joint endeavour between the Global Partnership for Education and IDRC, aims to contribute to the improvement of education policy and practice in the Global South. 

A key component of KIX is a knowledge sharing and exchange function, where country representatives come together to share information, innovation, and best practices related to education policy and programming and to inform knowledge gaps and policy priorities. Four regional hubs act as knowledge brokering units for KIX. This page provides information on the hub that primarily oversees activities in eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, Central Asia, and Asia-Pacific.

Hub details

Implementing organizationNetwork for international policies and cooperation in education and training (NORRAG)

Region: Eastern Europe, Middle East and North Africa, Central Asia, Asia-Pacific

Countries: Albania, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Georgia, Kyrgyz Republic, Laos, Maldives, Moldova, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Sudan, Tajikistan, Timor Leste, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Yemen  

Who are we?

The KIX Europe, Asia, and Pacific (EAP) hub facilitates cross-country knowledge exchange and mobilization, learning, synthesis, and collaboration among national education stakeholders in 21 Global Partnership for Education partner countries in Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. The hub functions as a regional forum within KIX.

The Network for international policies and cooperation in education and training (NORRAG), an associate program of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva,  manages this hub. NORRAG’s webpage on the hub, can be found here: KIX Europe, Asia, and Pacific (EAP).

What do we do?

The 21 countries represented by this hub face extremely diverse education issues, contexts, and histories that will be addressed using participatory and inclusive approaches to engage national education stakeholders, including governments, donors, international organizations, civil society organizations, teacher organizations, foundations, the private sector, and universities.

The hub will help bring shared priority themes to the surface and facilitate peer-learning. It will also support national education stakeholders to produce knowledge that is relevant at country, sub-regional, or regional levels. Gender issues will be integrated into the project’s policy analysis work. The learning will be demand-driven and developed through workshops, country visits, studies, and webinars.

About the region

The cluster of post-socialist countries (i.e. Central Asia, Caucasus, Eastern Europe, Mongolia) can build on a legacy of gender equity and near universal access to primary and lower secondary education.

Yemen, Sudan, and countries in South Asia must cope with large numbers of refugees, internally displaced persons, and out-of-school children and youth. UNESCO notes that enrollment ratios for girls in lower secondary range from below 50% in Afghanistan and Pakistan to almost double in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Georgia, Nepal, and Vietnam. The quality of education also ranges widely. For example, although children in Vietnam and Nepal have the same average number of years of schooling, Vietnamese children score much higher than Nepali children in standardized learning assessments, according to the World Bank.

The KIX EAP hub can address these challenges by helping to produce, document, and exchange regionally relevant knowledge and by creating new opportunities for joint capacity building across countries.

Setting regional priorities

To identify the priorities of the GPE-member countries that the hub oversees, KIX EAP led a process from March to July 2020 to identify shared policy challenges for public education systems. The process involved consultations with government and non-governmental education stakeholders from the countries, regional experts, and a review of education sector plans and regional education analyses. The reporton the results of this process revealed the following priorities: 

1. Realizing the potential of new curricula 

To make teaching more effective and improve learning outcomes, countries of the EAP region need to find appropriate ways to better align the different components associated with the implementation of new curriculum. 

2. Optimizing the use of Education Management Information Systems (EMIS) 

A central need is to optimize EMIS by improving data usage. The challenge is to create innovative ways to build capacities in Ministries of Education and other offices in charge of education management to organize, interpret and integrate data in from school level to the central/federal level. 

3. Ensuring inclusive access and stronger learning outcomes for girls and boys 

It is necessary to identify, adapt, contextualize and scale effective, culturally responsive approaches to improve gender equality in education access, retention and learning outcomes. 

4. Improving distance teaching and learning 

Educational systems need to learn more about how to contextualize and integrate successful experiences of distance education, including information and communication (ICT) tools and others. To be effective, they must find ways to connect students and teachers, and to close the digital gap, paying particular attention to vulnerable groups. 

For the most up to date information of the hub's progress, activities and upcoming events, visit: https://www.gpekix.org/regional-hub/kix-eap .

Hub map