Global Education Lab: working together to enhance children's opportunities
The Global Education Lab flagship at UGlobe partners with societal partners from around the world to address inequalities in education globally. Four sub-projects provide an update on their activities.
In September 2022, the United Nations organized the Transforming Education Summit. Following the summit, the Secretary-General on Transforming Education issued a Vision Statement, calling Transforming Education ‘An urgent political imperative for our collective future’.
The Centre for Global Challenges, in collaboration with the Utrecht University strategic theme Dynamics of Youth, is working together with education organisations from around the world to respond to this call for action. Specifically, UGlobe facilitates the Global Learning Community (GLC) on Whole Child Development. The GLC brings together 80 education organisations from around the world, from grassroots to international organisations. Through a series of interactive convenings over the past 1,5 year, the learning community has built the basis for connectivity and mutual learning. Members have expressed appreciation for the space to learn from the holistic approaches adopted by fellow members and have recognized how they are often facing similar challenges. Moving into a next phase, members will continue to meet on a bi-monthly base, and start to collaborate on concrete projects in smaller subgroups. We are excited to see the results of this new year of GLC activities and its power to support collective impact.
‘Measurement for Change’ is an initiative that aims to support Early Childhood Development (ECD) organizations use their monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) systems to design, implement, and scale effective interventions for (young) children in adversity. The initiative has been co-developed with implementing ECD organizations from across the globe. As a part of this collaboration, a special issue in which these implementing organizations provided case studies of how they use MEL to design and implement inclusive and sustainable programs. In total, the series contains 32 articles written by 157 authors, with the vast majority of contributions coming from the Global South. For more info, see: Effective Delivery of Integrated Interventions in Early Childhood: Innovations in Evidence Use, Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning | Frontiers Research Topic (frontiersin.org)
Special issue
Recently we launched a second special issue in Frontiers in Public Health. This special issue will specifically cover case studies on how practitioners and researchers use MEL to create effective ECD programs at scale. The ultimate aim is to understand how more children in adversity can be reached with high-quality ECD programs. We are accepting submissions until November 23, 2022. For more info, see: Achieving Impacts at Scale in Early Childhood Interventions: Innovations in Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning | Frontiers Research Topic (frontiersin.org).
Investment game
The Measurement for Change team also engaged in a discussion with funding agencies and regional ECD networks on how they can support their organizations using MEL for scaling. The discussion was part of the ECD week in Leiden, hosted by the International Step by Step Association (ISSA) and Porticus, just before the summer vacation. During the workshop, the participants played the ‘Investment Game’, in which the participants were placed in the shoes of implementing organizations and had to think through what type of information and from whom they would need to understand what was happening in their ECD program.
In 2019, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer won the Nobel prize in economics for their experimental approach to impact evaluations. Today, more than six thousand experiments have been registered at the American Economic Association, including many in the Global South. However, few of these RCTs are conducted by scholars based in the Global South. UGlobe’s collaboration with NIERA aimed to build training of RCT methods into economics curricula at more than a dozen higher education institutes in East Africa.
Since 2020, a team from UGlobe/USE and NIERA, under the guidance of Profs. Joost de Laat and Amos Njuguna, have been supporting scholars from across East Africa build course curricula targeting higher education students and professionals in the region. Altogether 12 researchers were selected as project fellows, 12 courses were built, and more than 200 people were trained across Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, and Ethiopia in the first round of delivering the courses. In addition, an online resource site was built.
Great impact
According to Christina Fille, one of the CIPA fellows: “The CIPA fellowship has had a great impact in my career because it has given me a chance to develop an impact evaluation curriculum to be taught at the Institute of Social Work. It has also given me the chance to share the knowledge of conducting vigorous research using impact evaluation research methods to Tanzanian students and lecturers. CIPA fellowship has also given me access to a lot of learning materials on impact evaluation research methods which can be accessed through the NIERA repository. CIPA fellowship has also had a great impact to the Institute of Social Work because many of its students have had the chance to be trained on impact evaluation research methods and the institute is also planning to adapt the curriculum which will be taught at Bachelor level and Masters level and students will get credit for this course.”
Aflatoun International is a non-profit organization offering social and financial education (SFE) to children and young people worldwide. Their curricula are tailored to different age groups and contextualized to the local needs and specific circumstances to empower children to make a positive change for a more equitable world, reaching 10.5 million children in 108 countries through over 345 partner organizations in 2019.
In our collaboration, we aim to provide evidence on the use and implementation of social and emotional skills targeting the support of the children's financial literacy, employment readiness, climate resilience, global citizenship, and gender equality. Our collaboration includes the search for an adequate social and emotional skillset, the possible methods of enhancing the skills identified, and methods to measure and quantify the success of the program's implementation.
Enhance social and emotional competencies
Given the evidence on the effectiveness of SEL, we hope to contribute to a fact-based curriculum, helping children around the globe enhance their social and emotional competencies. We expect the skills addressed in our report to assist young people in making informed decisions, communicating effectively, and developing coping and self-management skills that help them lead a healthy and productive life and which benefit themselves, their families, and their communities.