By Alina Lipcan, Director of Impact and Innovation at the Global Schools Forum (GSF) and Modupe Adefeso-Olateju, Managing Director of Nigeria's TEP Centre and an adviser to GSF's Learning Labs Programme.

This week's Global Education Summit is an important moment as governments, foundations and others commit funds to support systems to recover from the educational consequences of COVID-19 and tackle the wider learning crisis.

Credit: GPE/Kelley Lynch

But whilst the amount of funding pledged is important, so too will be ensuring that funds are spent effectively, and that spending results in improvements to learning outcomes. In our view, a key part of that will be investing in supporting education systems to innovate.

Supporting innovation is not just beneficial in the short term but can also increase resilience to future crises. Over the last year, in response to the pandemic, we've seen governments and educational organisations across the world problem-solve, experiment, iterate, and partner for scale. The result has been new, cost-effective models to equitably and sustainably deliver education, benefiting children across the world. In Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya, Educate! conducted skills training with young people via SMS and conference call. Rising on Air partnered with governments in Liberia and Sierra Leone, among others, to deliver radio lessons. In Botswana, Young 1ove partnered with district-level and national-level officials to adapt the Teaching at the Right Level curriculum for the pandemic.

The benefits of supporting innovation are very high. Michael Kremer estimates that USAID's early investments as part of the Development Innovations Venture generated a 5:1 ratio of social benefits to costs. That is, the benefits of supporting successful innovations far outweighed the costs of investing in failed innovations.

We need to build on these advances and create an ecosystem which enables this resourcefulness to continue, ensuring that future crises cannot catch us unprepared. This means:

Continue reading "Transforming education will require innovation, not just money"

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