3. Make education inclusive
Reaching all children, in particular the most vulnerable and marginalized, is a priority for GPE, which has provided US$440 million since 2012 to support inclusive education.
- GPE supported the government of Zanzibar to make its education system more inclusive by training hundreds of teachers on guidance and counseling, detecting special needs, and developing classroom skills for including children with disabilities. GPE also helped distribute glasses and hearing aids to vision- and hearing-impaired children; and more than 250,000 learning and teaching materials for inclusive education.
4. Leave no girl behind
Investing in girls’ education has a ripple effect that benefits their families, communities, and countries. GPE works with partners to put gender equality at the heart of national education systems:
- To enroll more girls in school, the government of Afghanistan, recruited, trained, and deployed female teachers to community-based schools in some of the country’s poorest districts. Thanks to these efforts, the rate of girls enrolling in primary school rose from 44% in 2002 to 84% in 2017.
- Balochistan’s province in Pakistan has improved school enrollment and retention, especially for girls. Between 2015 and 2018, student retention in GPE-supported schools increased from 70% to 89%, and the number of girls enrolled in grades 1-5 increased from 7,500 to 35,000.
5. Provide good data
Education data are key to know which children are not in school or not learning. More than ever, GPE is helping partner countries improve their data collection and analysis:
- Sudan is strengthening its management and monitoring capacity through three systems: a teacher database; national learning assessments; and a rapid education management information system, which provides reliable information on primary and secondary education. These systems help Sudan better collect and analyze data for education planning and management.
6. Focus on learning
Despite the fact that more children than ever are in school, too many still don’t learn the basics: a waste of resources invested in education, and in human potential. GPE helps partner countries close the learning gap:
- With GPE support, Ethiopia conducted education reforms to improve the quality of teaching and learning in over 40,000 schools. A new curriculum was developed and over 200,000 teachers upgraded their qualifications. As a result, 44% of teachers in grades 1-4 were trained in 2013, up from just 3% in 2006.
- Guyana, with support from GPE, launched an early learning program that helped children in the most disadvantaged areas of the country develop the building blocks of lifelong learning. In 2018, almost 90% of children mastered reading and math skills compared to only 37% in 2016.
Comments
This a great recipe for 'cooking' a good education system, and little disagreement is perhaps possible on the ingredients. However, from my personal experience of living and working in a country (India) where the need for good quality education system is acute, and yet the political will and resource allocation seems to lag significantly behind, I believe that much of such recipes focus on strengthening the supply side of learning often not simultaneously emphasising two critical factors. One, the need to strengthen demand for good quality education that is more broad-based as opposed to being driven by top percentiles of population which leads to extremely skewed supply-side education systems, which in turn is detrimental to raising the national levels of educational attainments. Second, we should focus on making learning enjoyable, and not focussed exclusively at getting a job or a degree. Among other factors, the latter crucially depends on the quality and commitment of teachers who motivate students to learn. We need to build a national culture where becoming a teacher is a sought-after career aspiration among students, as opposed to being a residual category of employment mostly for non-achievers.
Good to see, but under item 1, welcome attention to ECCE should not mean starting to provide textbooks early in all cases. Better for policymakers to work with specialists to support good ECCE pedagogy rather than seeing textbooks as way of bestowing an aura of concern by government and agencies.
Amazing article!!! Thank you for changing the world for the better!
How does someone volunteer to teach or train teachers? I taught in the Peace Corps in Ghana and my wife worked at a teacher training center training teachers to teach English at the primary level. We both taught middle and high school in Zambia. I worked for USAID training teachers in an Egyptian school in Cairo to involve the students in the lessons. We would like to volunteer again. Teaching in the local language in Zambia makes so much sense!!!
One challenge in strengthening the education system is to incentivize female educators to offer programs that might fall outside of the formal curriculum. Do you have examples of such programs and of incentives that encouraged these "educational changemakers" to do more?
In reply to Default Subject by Constance Kane
Thanks constance. Can you clarify what you mean by "programs that might fall outside of the formal curriculum"?
Educational equity reveals that all kinds of people should get the same type of education in the educational system. Equity4Education shared some helpful tips with you. Follow this link https://equity4education.org/
As a Guyanese, and an educator, I am really impressed with the work being done by GPE in Guyana. My husband (Jamaican) and I have are considering returning to live in Guyana. So, two questions:
(1) How can I be personally involved in the work that GPE is doing in Guyana?
(2) Is GPE doing a work in Jamaica?
I wait to hear from you. Thank you very much.
In reply to As a Guyanese, and an… by Shelly Thorpe
Thank you for your comment. GPE is not working with Jamaica at this time, based on the country's income level (GPE supports low-income countries). In Guyana, GPE currently supports the ministry of education to implement its COVID-19 response, with UNICEF as GPE grant agent. You can have a look at the grant documents on the Guyana page (click on "Key documents" at the top) to get further information on the type of activities that are being implemented and where you may be able to find entry points: https://www.globalpartnership.org/where-we-work/guyana
In Africa, the Gross Enrollment ratio for university and other tetiary institution is 9.8% (World Bank, 2022). In Countries Like Uganda, GER is 5.8% signifying that 94.2% of the children dropout of schools before schools bfore acquiring sufficient knowledge. The couse of school dropout is associated with extreme household poverty, poor curriculum which is not child-target to be inclusive in the way of accommodating both gifted and slow learners. The curriculum of primary in Uganda require alot from children hence exhausting/ fatiguing them as if they want children to understand everything in primary schools. To make matters warse they primary schools do not have science laboratory to introduce science practical lessons that would prepare them for secondary school chemistry and Biology.
We better search for funding to start science laboratory in primary schools and even reduce the too much work for science