Knowledge and Innovation Exchange Design Blueprint

• In Event: How to generate and use knowledge and evidence for education policy reform: perspectives on the potential of GPE's new financing mechanisms

Proposal

Knowledge and Innovation Exchange to build stronger, more sustainable education systems

A wide literature acknowledges that investments in the exchange of knowledge, innovation and evidence generation can catalyse policy change and strengthen national capacity to design and implement programs that target key policy challenges. There is widespread recognition of a gap between global-level evidence about what policies work and the capacity of national level stakeholders to contribute to and utilize cross-national evidence (Fredriksen 2011). Furthermore, recent analyses emphasize significant national capacity gaps in the collection and utilization of data for policy processes in the education sector (Crouch 2015; Crouch and de Stefano 2016). The need for more country-driven approaches to the identification and exchange of knowledge, the importance of South-South and South-North-South forms of peer learning, and the scaling of relevant innovations is also widely acknowledged (BCG 2018, Brookings 2017).

Yet international evidence suggests that knowledge and good practice exchange activities are underfunded in the education sector as compared to the health sector – and that there is a particular gap in the translation of research into applied practice at the country level. Recent estimates suggest that less than 3% (or approximately US$ 242 million) of development assistance for education support global/cross-national knowledge, research and exchange of good practice –as compared to US$4.7 billion, or 23% of total ODA for health in 2013.

Additionally, while there is no shortage of innovations in education – Brookings identifies over 3,000 currently active – there are numerous challenges to scaling innovations throughout national systems and across national boundaries as not only do they need to be owned by national governments and stakeholders but require sophisticated adaptation to be context relevant.

For these reasons, international development organizations such as DFID, the World Bank, DFAT and GAVI are experimenting with different ways of investing in the cross-national generation and exchange of knowledge and innovation, including through stronger global level investments in data and the use of peer exchange about key policy challenges.

In recognition of the fact that education systems can be more relevant, effective and sustainable by increasing the engagement of developing countries and other partners in knowledge generation, innovation, and capacity strengthening, the Global Partnership for Education is launching the Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (KIX) mechanism as a means to strengthen national education systems and accelerate educational progress.

KIX will actively broker existing knowledge and innovation capabilities and links them to national policy and planning processes, investment in the capacity of developing countries and their partners as creators of knowledge, as innovators and as active agents in knowledge transfer, and develop regional and global public goods that foster knowledge exchange in global education.

Author

• Ian Macpherson, Global Partnership for Education